A Political Extinction Moment for the Woke Left—LIVE from CPAC
On a special episode of The Charlie Kirk Show, we’re bringing to you both of Charlie’s speaking slots this past week from CPAC 2022 in Florida. First, his MainStage speech in which he calls for an uprising of grassroots activism and lays out the path forward as The Rise of the Citizen continues into the midterms. Next, a special panel live from stage to pay tribute to Andrew Breitbart on the 10th anniversary of his death. Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Conservatives Must Get Priorities Right00:08:50
Hey everybody, I had a PAC Day at CPAC.
First, I spoke directly to the audience.
You'll hear that first.
And then my panel, Remembering the Great Andrew Breitbart, with Alex Marla and Matt Boyle, Larry O'Connor, and James O'Keefe as we remember the great Andrew Breitbart.
Subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show podcast by hitting subscribe in the upper right-hand corner.
And if you want to email me, it's freedom at charliekirk.com.
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.
Hello, CPAC.
Great to see you guys.
It's great to be in a free state.
Ron DeSantis is doing such a great job, isn't he?
I mean, he's been probably the greatest governor.
He's been unbelievable.
I want to thank CPAC for having us.
It's so great to see so many grassroots activists from all across the country.
There's something special happening in America right now.
And a year ago when we met, things looked pretty bad.
Now, I understand things don't look great.
Double-digit inflation, border-wide open, all these crime going up.
But there's something that's happened in the last 12 months that is very significant.
And every single one of you have played a role in that.
You could have gave up.
This election, the last election, the 2020 election, was the most interfered with corrupt election in our lifetime.
And we need to say that over and over again.
$400 million from Mark Zuckerberg, the inability to talk about these issues on Facebook or Google.
And it would have been very easy for all of you to give up.
Instead, the opposite happened.
And the people in charge of our government, Hollywood, the media, they couldn't really understand why all of a sudden my dads kept on showing up to school board meetings across the country.
They couldn't understand why all of a sudden people started to run for precinct committee positions.
They couldn't understand why the energy of the conservative movement only increased when they controlled everything.
And what we saw over the last year is the regime controlling every aspect of our life.
Literally, whether or not and how you can breathe.
Vaccination status.
Let me just say one thing.
No one should ever be forced to get a vaccine against their will.
Period.
End of story.
Hard stop.
And instead, we have seen an unprecedented rise of the citizen in the last 12 months.
And the regime doesn't know where this is coming from.
CNN's ratings are collapsing.
Their top cable news hosts are taking time off.
They're already getting ready.
They're bracing for impact for something completely and totally historic.
But I don't know about you, but I don't just want to win.
I want to look at what's happening right now.
And I want to be part of an extinction event for the political woke left to put them into complete and total irrelevancy for the next 20 or 30 years.
Now, in order to do that, though, we as conservatives must get our priorities right.
We must be very honest with each other and our leaders must be honest with you about what really matters.
You see, we're a nation in multiple crises right now.
We are $30 trillion in debt.
We have the most suicidal, alcohol-addicted, drug-addicted generation in history.
We got a lot of problems.
So we have to demand from our leaders not just solutions, but direct addressing of what actually matters.
For example, the U.S.-southern border matters a lot more than the Ukrainian border.
In fact, I want every Republican leader that comes up on stage the next couple days to call what's happening on the southern border an invasion because 2 million people waltzed into our country this last year.
I'm more worried about how the cartels are deliberately trying to infiltrate our country than a dispute 5,000 miles away, cities we can't pronounce, places that most Americans can't find on a map.
Now, I'm not defending the actions of dictators halfway across the world.
What I'm saying, though, is when your own country is falling apart, I don't want to hear lectures about why we need to send our troops halfway across the world when we are being invaded.
Priorities.
The left wants to talk about how men can become pregnant.
They can't.
Men are men, women are women.
There's only two genders.
End of story.
Thanks for shopping.
These are smokescreen tactics to try to distract us from the fact that we lost over 100,000 people to drug overdoses in this last year.
They don't want you to talk about how the generation that I speak to, college and high school kids, they are being priced out of the housing market.
They're being told to go to college to study things that don't matter to find jobs that don't exist, to borrow money they don't have.
Everything costs twice as much in most of the metropolitan areas of Phoenix and Dallas and Orlando, Miami, Tampa.
No, instead, our leaders want to talk about systemic racism or climate change.
The conservative movement must be very clear that we're going to talk about things that matter to our voters, matter to American families.
And one of the things that we must be very clear about is how the lockdowns, the vaccine mandates, and the mask mandates was generational theft.
Now, this might, now some people in this audience don't want to hear this, but it's immoral and it was wrong when we decided to deliberately hurt the younger generation to try to protect the older generation.
It was a moral tragedy on this country.
And our leaders need to talk about a national recovery program.
We need to talk about how we can elevate young people who do the three things that create conservatives.
You want to create conservatives, we all do.
Make it easier to buy a home, make it easier to get married, and make it easier to have children.
You have a lot more conservatives.
Instead, we have a generation of renters, a generation of people that are the least married generation in history, having the least children in history.
And we wonder why they find purpose in Leonardo DiCaprio, Greta Thunberg, climate change type movements.
We wonder why they want to confiscate the wealth from business owners.
They don't own anything.
People that pay mortgages don't burn Wendy's at night.
Just good rule of life.
So we must demand from our leaders clear priorities of what actually matters.
So we have a choice.
We could do the Republican Party of old, where we do nothing but talk about corporate tax cuts for the richest people.
We just talk about stopping socialism and the conversation ends there.
We talk about how we need to go send our beautiful and amazing armed service members to countries that have no relevancy to our immediate future.
Or, here's the amazing thing, though.
If our conservative leaders learn something from our wonderful 45th president of the United States and actually decide to not just talk about but deliver some very common sense things, such as representing the muscular class, such as how about this?
The Republicans should say what happened in Canada and what Justin Trudeau did against those Canadian truckers is a moral outrage and a human rights abuse.
Where's the Republican Party been on that?
So I'll say this in closing.
I want to win.
I don't want to win elections.
That's fine.
That's a small thing.
Elections come and go.
I want to win the civilization.
I want to live in a country that is free.
I want to live in a country I recognize.
I want our leaders to care more about you and our fellow countrymen and our fellow citizens than some sort of abstract idea or some sort of undefined GDP number.
The conservative movement is trending towards a movement that will represent 60, 70, 80% of voters of all backgrounds and all colors.
It's going to require our leaders and you to make sure they do it.
Fighting For Us For A Change00:14:39
The citizen is rising, everybody, and the regime has fallen.
We're going to win.
God bless you guys.
Thank you so much.
Please welcome from Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk from Project Veritas, James O'Keefe, from Breitbart News Network, Matt Boyle, and your host, Larry O'Connor.
Hey guys.
Let's hear for Andrew Breitbart.
Oh, he's more than just a name on a website, especially here at CPAC.
It was, guys, it was 10 years ago this week that Andrew Breitbart gave his last major public speech.
We lost him on March 1st, 10 years ago next week.
But that speech, like all of his speeches at CPAC, instantly became legendary.
I just watched it last week.
I literally just watched it as well.
It was weirdly prophetic, wasn't it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All the major issues that he's talking about, the critical race theory.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, literally, the major story that he was ready to break right after CPAC, leading into the 2012 election, was how Barack Obama had been infected with critical race theory in Harvard.
Critical race theory.
Remember when critical race theory became a big story this last election and people went on MSNBC saying, they don't even know where critical race theory is.
They just, you know, found out about it.
There's no Andrew Breitbart, as usual, ahead of his time, talking about it 10 years ago.
We each represent a very different relationship directly with Andrew Breitbart in our own way.
Andrew plucked me out of the world of commercial theater.
I literally worked on Broadway, not as an actor, but in management of theater management.
I managed a theater in Los Angeles.
He took me out of that world and put me into the world of political commentary with my first column at his first site, Big Hollywood, that then eventually morphed into Breitbart News Network.
So I got to work with him for three glorious years and have a whole new career.
Matt, you ended up working with Andrew, well, for his company right after his passing, right?
Yeah, so I was a reporter at Daily Caller, got to know him really well.
Tucker Carlson introduced me to Andrew, and then Andrew passed away in early 2012.
After the 2012 election, I came over to work at Breitbart and build out our DC Bureau.
Great.
But yeah, it totally changed my life.
I could have gone to go anywhere in the established media.
I was breaking all sorts of big stories and whatever.
Andrew changed my life.
Like, I literally chose this path to build out a new conservative media outlet.
And guess what?
We're kicking their butts all the time right now.
I think it's fair to say Andrew changed all our lives.
James, I mean, I mentioned Big Hollywood.
That launched January of 2009.
I believe it was September.
Along came this brand new site, Big Government, and it launched with a little expose about an organization that no longer exists called Acorn.
Remember that?
James?
Well, I had gotten a message from Hannah Giles, and she said she wanted to go into Acorn as a prostitute.
So I said, Do you often get messages from Hannah like this?
I get a lot of messages from a lot of people.
And I said, well, why don't we go in there?
I'll go in there as a pimp.
Sure.
Sure.
A logical response.
Do a sting investigation into Acorn.
And this is right before Project Veritas even existed.
So we did the video, did the whole story.
For those of you who remember it, 10 years ago, actually 12 years ago.
12 years ago.
And I didn't know who to go to with the tapes.
And everyone sort of said, well, there's this guy named Andrew Breitbart.
I didn't know him.
And I called him up, or he called me, and he said, I don't believe you have this information.
So I said, well, can I come to Los Angeles and show you?
He's like, sure.
So I went to his house.
I opened up my laptop.
I played the first Acorn video of me with a hidden camera in my tie recording these workers.
And he instantly said, this is going to change everything.
This is going to embarrass the New York Times.
And he came up with this strategy to release the tapes one at a time.
Because you had investigated multiple Acorn offices on the East Coast.
So he predicted rightfully that these organizations, CNN and everyone would say it's isolated.
And then the next day, the second tape.
And the third day, the third tape.
And by the end of the first week, Congress, Democratically controlled Senate, defunded Acorn.
Defunded Acorn.
82 to 6 vote, if I remember right, or maybe 89 to 2 votes.
It was 83 to 7.
South Park covered it.
The Daily Show covered it favorably.
Yeah.
And then Charlie, and I, frankly, I think your representation here is most meaningful because you didn't meet Andrew personally.
But you represent so many people out there, so many people in this room who were inspired by Andrew Breitbart, who have started a movement on their own because of the inspiration Andrew gave you.
Yeah, not just inspired.
My first piece I ever wrote was for Breitbart.com.
And it wasn't, you know, kind of unpacking an interstate government-funded prostitution ring.
By the way, it's a great idea.
Well, raise the bar, Charlie.
Come on.
Oh, yeah, exactly.
I just want to say, isn't James O'Keefe doing great work in Project Veritas?
They're doing unbelievable work.
They really are.
I want to make sure I say that.
James, you're continuing the legacy of Andrew amazingly.
But I was in high school, and I found a textbook that said kind of really incendiary things, at least what would have been considered that 10 years ago.
And I emailed Joe Pollack.
I just saw his email on Breitbart.com as a tip, and he's like, why don't you just write the piece?
And it got on Drudge Report and kind of all of that.
And without Breitbart.com, I don't know if I ever would have been involved in this at all.
And I got to know the whole team at Breitbart really well.
Matt, you and I have been working together for quite some time.
Got to know Alex and got to know Larry.
And the legacy of Andrew was always believing in younger aspirational entrepreneurial talent.
He's the best at that.
And there are a lot of names we could go through.
But if you look at the kind of roster of people that are now in conservative politics and media, so many of them were kind of nurtured and also kind of given a platform by Andrew.
He was a movement guy.
He was not an empire guy.
And I never had an opportunity to meet him.
In fact, my piece was written a month after he passed away.
So almost exactly a month after.
I want to say one other thing about Breitbart and Andrew, which is we take for granted this kind of idea of making things go viral, right?
And so, for some of the younger people here, if you're in high school or college, you might not know how good Andrew was at this.
He was the pioneer.
He invented this.
He was the one that was able to get Anthony Weiner completely resigned in disgrace, right?
Amongst many other things.
But he.
But in perfect Andrew Breitbart fashion, where he actually ended up at the podium at Anthony Weiner's own press conference.
That's right.
Taking questions across all the cable channels.
It wasn't enough that Anthony Weiner had to resign in disgrace.
Andrew had to be there to emcee the entire event.
It was a total surprise, too, by the way.
I remember on his way in there, he called me and I was like, We're waiting.
We're all sitting there waiting to watch to see Anthony Weiner come out.
And he's like, I'm like, where are you?
He's like, I'm about to walk into the Anthony Weiner press conference.
I'm like, what?
I was shocked.
And then next thing you know, there's Andrew.
I wish I would have gave a group text message to us because a couple of us were like, Andrew, are you sure you want to go into the Anthony Wiener press conference?
And of course, we always second-guessed him, and he was always right.
I wish I'd have saved this.
The text message was, don't worry, I'll keep a low profile.
Next thing.
Sorry, but you were saying, and it's exactly right.
And so the movement we have at Turning Point USA, Project Veritas, they're all offshoots from the energy of Andrew.
And it lives on in more ways than one.
He was the first person that mastered the viral medium of getting a video in front of millions of people.
And, you know, we take that for granted now.
He really was the architect.
Oh, an incredible pioneer.
Yeah, please absolutely applaud anytime you want, because it's for Andrew.
He was a pioneer, not just for the media, but certainly for the intersection of media and politics and culture and everything.
I want to say something real fast, though, because the name of this panel is War.
And you've all seen the video of Andrew saying war, right?
And that was the trailer for the film Hating Breitbart.
And there were a lot of hashtags about Andrew Breitbart, war and Breitbart's army.
And there are all these viral videos, you talk about viral videos of Andrew Breitbart.
He's always in the trenches fighting, fighting, fighting, fighting.
And it was great to see somebody fighting for us for a change.
This was 10 years ago when we were used to the blue jacket, khaki pants, penny loafer, country club kind of conservative.
No offense, James.
And Andrew would show up in his, you know, beat-up converse and Hawaiian shirt and his hair everywhere.
But he was fighting for us.
He would go toward the crowd, and he was a fighter.
But I don't want us to forget something.
The term happy warrior is thrown around a lot.
He was the quintessential happy warrior.
Andrew Breitbart was hilarious.
The funnest time I've ever had in my entire professional life was the three years I worked for.
I never stopped laughing.
He was so much fun hanging out with all the time.
I mean, that's the okay.
So first off, I highly recommend that everybody go out there and watch some of the old speeches because he is pretty funny and you see the sense of humor come through.
Like that 2012 CPAC speech is probably the best one.
In it, he talks about going to dinner with Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn.
This was a thing that Tucker, so they, these two lefty Bill Ayers.
These are the terrorists from the Weather Underground who inspired Barack Obama's political career.
Right, exactly.
And so they put out a thing during the beginning of the Obama administration, an auction for a dinner with them.
And I remember when it came out, again, I was a reporter at Daily Caller.
I encouraged Tucker Carlson to go buy it.
So he did.
He actually, he got it.
And then he invited Andrew as his guest to go with him.
And then Andrew's talking about.
Tucker wins this dinner with them.
And the first thing, we got to get Andrew at the table.
Right.
And so now in this speech at CPAC in 2012, Andrew's talking about how excellent a cook Bill Ayers is, right?
Like, you know, he made very excellent ribs and succulent squash and everything.
But then he's like, you know, they were very charming people, but, you know, then he goes, but so was Ted Bundy, right?
So, yeah, so again, Andrew, very funny guy, and that personality and that fun mentality, that happy warrior mentality, I think, carries through.
Yeah, and I'm afraid we don't often see that part of it.
It's out there.
We need to see it.
But I mean, James, the audacious way you presented the Acorn videos and then the just flat-out fun Andrew had with it.
Yeah, what I remember about Andrew is a couple things.
He simultaneously was able to hold the media accountable, yet speak with them and work with them.
That's a very fine line.
And now, I mean, people in this room, I mean, people hate the mainstream media, but Andrew was able to sort of hack the mainstream media and get them to cover things.
And right before he died, a few days before he died, he died 10 years ago on, I believe, March 1st, Tuesday.
March 1st, the evening of the 28th.
It was a leap year, it was the 29th evening to the first.
A few days before that, you know, we were going through a lot of the time.
You and I were working together, and I was doing videos, and he said, James, and I'm paraphrasing him, he said, they want us on a leash.
They want us to dance with them, but we're not going to dance with them.
He had this very profound, intense way of speaking.
And he said, and there was a quote that he said, where if you keep running towards the fire, if you keep going, you send a message to other people that are rooting for you, that they in fact can do it too, if you keep going.
But he was a force of nature.
I mean, I have so many stories.
But there was one story about the alpaca, right?
The alpaca, retracto, the correction alpaca.
All right, so we started getting these newspapers and websites to retract fake stories.
Fake news.
Andrew knew about fake news well before it became a catchphrase.
And this actually was the brilliance of Alex Marlowe, who's now the editor-in-chief of the Breitbart sites.
At the time, he was the first person Andrew ever hired.
He met him giving a speech to young conservatives at Berkeley, by the way.
No, but this is a lesson.
When you're Andrew Breitbart or any conservative, there are conservatives even at Berkeley.
And Alex Marlow was one of them.
And he gave a Young Americas for Freedom spare Young Americans Foundation speech at Berkeley.
Alex went up and said, I love you.
I want to work for you.
And he hired him.
I think his first day on the job, he helped him move his desk out of his.
That was the retraction.
The alpaca was Alex's.
So Alex came up and says, We got all these retractions on this, on these fake stories.
And so, and Andrew said, well, you got to brand the retraction somehow, brand it.
It's like, how do you brand a retraction?
They created a byline at the big journalism site called Retracto the Correction Alpaca.
And he lives on to this day.
Obviously, that's a logical thing to do.
This does come up on our internet.
Andrew called me because I was arrested in New Orleans and everyone's lying about what happened to me.
And then at like midnight, Andrew calls me and he goes, James, the mascot for the Retracto theme song is an alpaca.
And we laughed until we cried.
I don't know why, but it was just so random.
And he just goofy and funny.
I mean, we laughed until we cried on midnight in February 2010.
Oh, man.
That was a pretty amazing moment.
Yeah.
And actually, Charlie, this is important because his humor and his love of life and how the vivacious way he approached all of this stuff as a happy warrior, this attracted young people to him.
How old were you at the time?
I was in high school, I was 18.
18.
And for God's sake, how many times have we gone to these conferences and we hear somebody who's 90 years old saying, how do we attract young people to the movement?
How did Andrew attract you to the movement?
Yeah, I mean, he was authentic and he was willing to push the boundaries.
It was the videos of him going up to protesters asking them, What does your sign say?
And they didn't know.
They were like, I don't know.
He was the first one to do that, right?
The Happy Warrior Approach00:05:57
He was the first one to actually go straight into the fire.
And every enemy Andrew Breitbart had, it was a good list.
That list still is pretty good to this day, I can tell you.
He would go to all their conferences and just show up in the lobby.
And look, we're kind of used to that now.
Not used to it, but there's a lot of different people that kind of do that sort of work.
This was unheard of in like 2010 conservatism, right?
Yeah.
It was like, hey, you know, we don't control the White House.
Obama's president.
Like, just wait your turn.
Keep your head down.
Layla.
Yeah, keep your head down.
And Andrew was going around talking about how Barack Obama is destroying the country from within and he's doing it intentionally.
And I mean, Breitbart changed Breitbart.com and Andrew completely changed the way that conservatives fight the left.
This is one of his great legacies.
And Andrew fought to win.
Is that he didn't just fought to win?
Thank you.
And it wasn't just to be in the fight.
It was like, wait, we're doing something.
No, it was like, okay, you know, the other side decided to end kind of the coffee shop dialogue a long time ago, right?
It's like we're in a street fight.
And Andrew's like, okay, if we're in a street fight, then we're going to win because the country's at stake.
And I think that's inspired millions of people in a very profound way.
But I don't want to overlook the fact, again, I mean, I remember going with him and Brandon Darby, who still runs Breitbart.
He runs our lawyer team.
Brandon Darby and I accompanied Andrew to a protest of America's for prosperity.
I think it was America for Prosperity out in Palm Desert, California.
And Andrew says, all right, we're going to go to the protesters, we're going to confront them, we're going to start challenging them, we're going to ask him questions.
And Larry, you're going to be the cameraman.
Brandon, you're going to do tactical.
We're going to make sure that we got to watch our back and everything.
So we're getting all set.
So we park, we get out, he goes to the back of his Range Rover and he starts putting on rollerblades.
It's like, wait, Andrew, we didn't talk through the rollerblade part of this.
What are you talking about?
He goes, oh, yeah, yeah, no, the whole time I'm taunting them and challenging them, and I'm going to be on rollerblades.
Which was, of course, brilliant in its insanity, but that went viral, right?
You said, and so it was always with a smile.
In fact, at the end, he said to all the protesters, all right, come on, we're all going to Applebee's.
And I kid you not, we were tracking them on Twitter and on social media.
They all went to Applebee's.
We almost went.
Hilarious.
We should have gone to Applebee's as well.
Can I say one quick thing?
Everyone here has heard the expression multiple times: politics flows downstream from culture.
Oh, yeah.
That was him.
He identified this early.
He made conservatives reorient what mattered as well.
And he wrote about it in his book extensively.
He said, Look, the arts, the culture, Hollywood matters a lot more than whether or not ours versus he also had this understanding of the institutional flaws of the establishment media.
So if you listen to people that work at the New York Times or CNN or any of these other places, they claim to be objective.
They claim that they, here's the problem with that.
We're human beings.
Any decision we make has the opportunity for the insertion of bias, intended or not.
In some cases, a lot of the establishment media, it's unintended.
But what we see is what stories they cover, what stories they don't cover.
That's the most important thing.
They ignore important stories.
And what's happened in the timeframe since Andrew passed away is: I mean, look, we've built out Breitbart.com and these other institutions, what Charlie's doing at Turning Point, what James is doing, what Larry's doing, what everybody else is doing out here throughout the conservative media.
I mean, we've literally built these things into a strong institution that didn't exist before.
And so, I mean, frankly, I mean, just Breitbart in the last three months alone, we beat the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Hill, and Politico combined.
And I think we're seeing similar stuff from a lot of these other places as well.
And I think that that, Again, these institutions wouldn't have existed had Andrew not paved the way for all of us beforehand.
James Charlie just mentioned something very important, too, about the tactics.
I remember you rolled out a lot of the videos utilizing Sololinsky's Rules for Radicals, remember?
Like the headline of each new video took one of Sololinsky's rules.
Because let's be clear, I mean, Sololinsky was a terrible, horrible anti-American communist.
But that doesn't mean his rules weren't correct.
I mean, the rules actually are effective.
The difference was he used their rules against them.
Yeah, Linsky, Andrew and I, when I met him in his basement with Larry Soloff, Alinsky rule number four, make them live up to their own book of rules.
And Linsky says in his book, Rules for Radicals, you can destroy them with that because they can't live up to your book of rules, but they have to live up to their own.
So, I mean, it was, he was a, another story was he was a leader, but he was also very tactical.
So he would tweet, I don't know how many times a day.
Oh, my God.
He's like a machine.
I mean, he would tweet hundreds of times.
And he would get into every little fight, no matter how big or small, he would fight the person.
The rule is you only punch up.
Well, he'd punch down.
I mean, he'd tweet, reply to every single person.
And there was one video we did, Teachers Gone Wild in New Jersey in 2010.
And we did this video, and I had just got off the set with the IFB in doing a local media hit.
And he already transcribed Chris Christie's entire speech about it.
He transcribed the speech.
So he wasn't just this leader.
He was fighting in every little trench.
And it was all about narrative.
And again, I don't know of anyone else who's really filled his shoes.
Oh, everybody said after he died, who will replace Andrew Breitbart?
No one.
No one did what he did.
No, but let's talk this through for a minute.
No One Filled His Shoes00:05:30
Couple names you might recognize, couple memes you might not, because they do vital work behind the scenes as well.
But we mentioned Alex Marlowe, the new editor-in-chief, or not new, but he's the editor-in-chief of Breitbart and hosts the serious Exxon radio show for Breitbart, Joel Pollock, a vital voice at Breitbart right now, right?
The four of us up here, right?
How about a Dana Lash, right?
How about Ben Shapiro?
Right?
Where was Ben Shapiro for?
I mean, it was at the Breitbart sites.
John Nolte, who is still a vital voice at Big Hollywood, right?
Christian Toto, who does incredible work on Hollywood and the culture.
I'm leaving so many people out of this conversation.
There's literally hundreds.
I mean, Andrew Clavin, Stephen Crowder.
Right?
And oh, and by the way, a guy who had a really obscure four-in-the-morning show on Fox, thanks to Andrew Breitbart's suggestion, who started writing at the Breitbart sites.
His name is Greg Gutfell.
Kurt Schlichter, Chris de Gaulle.
I mean, I can get Tony Katz and all of my colleagues in talk radio right now.
We owe all of this to Andrew.
He's a great baseball fan, Andrew was, sadly for the Dodgers.
But he used to say he didn't want to be the cleanup hitter.
He didn't want to be the leadoff hitter.
He didn't even want to play on the team.
He didn't even want to be the manager.
He wanted to be the talent scout.
He would say that all the time.
He thought his special skill was finding the right people and putting them in the right place.
I mean, look.
Well, and by the way, I mean, speaking of which, I mean, we've literally hired over the course of the last 10 years that I've been working here dozens and dozens of new up-and-coming reporters.
I mean, the names that you just rattle off there are a lot of those people are really well-known names, but we've got new and yeah, the next generation.
By the way, speaking of which, anybody out there that knows anybody that wants to be a reporter, reach out to me.
We are hiring.
So, and I know James is a big hire that he announced there a few minutes ago, but we are definitely hiring.
So, we are always looking for talented young people.
But it's exciting to see these young folks come through.
That's one of the coolest parts of the job.
In 2010, I want to say, White House Correspondents Association dinner, Andrew goes, reported, James does rock.
You just do whatever you let it flow, buddy.
He's feeling the Andrew energy.
Andrew crashes the MSNBC party at the White House Correspondents Association.
Rachel Maddow is tending bar.
Andrew goes right up to her and starts talking to her.
And she makes him a drink.
And he says, well, make yourself one.
And she does.
And they start drinking and laughing together.
And there's a picture.
It's a very famous picture of Andrew at the bar with Rachel Maddow.
And they're like toasting each other because everyone loved Andrew, even the people who pretended to hate him.
And I think that we can take something from that.
One of the things that reminds me of the story with the New Yorker reporter.
I don't know if you were there or someone was there, but it was a New York reporter.
And everywhere I'd go, Andrew would have reporters following him, like an entourage, magazine writers.
And in the beginning, I was a little skittish.
I was like, you sure you want to be interviewed by these people?
I don't trust them.
And Andrew had a totally unique approach.
He would say, no, no, no, be yourself in front of them.
Just be yourself.
Just say who you are.
Identify yourself.
And I think a lot of people in this room would be very scared about being interviewed by a reporter for New Yorker magazine.
Andrew had a radical approach, which was be yourself, be open.
And I've become more that way.
Kept less secrets, if you will.
No bad secrets, but just be yourself.
And everywhere I'd go, he'd have a slate reporter, a New York reporter, a wired reporter following him around.
And he said, just be open about who you are.
And that's the way he was.
And you got to really know him, and he was who he said he was.
He did Bill Maher's show, and they treated him horribly.
I got to hang out with him backstage and in the green room, and they were all just awful to him.
And when he was on stage, all the writers were making snide comments.
And Marlowe and I were in the green room with them.
We were like, oh, we're here with Andrew.
And afterwards, they do a party, an after-show party.
And Bill couldn't stop.
It was just Bill and Andrew in the center of the room talking to each other and having a great time.
And Bill respected Andrew, and Andrew enjoyed being on the show.
And they were worlds apart politically, right?
But he understood how to utilize that platform and get it.
Oh, and boy, all the writers just hated the fact that Bill Maher was spending time with Andrew.
But here's the thing: when he connected just a little bit and convinced Bill Maher just a little bit.
And by the way, look, look at where Bill Maher is now.
I mean, he's out there questioning some of the stuff on the pandemic and all these other things.
So if you connect with these people just a little bit, isn't it worth it?
Last thoughts, guys?
Because they made the mistake of telling us before we came out that they were running early.
And so.
Screw it.
I mean, look, I'll say one.
I have this kind of story that is about Andrew, not anything I experienced, but that we can all thank Andrew for, which is, so the Clintons hated Andrew because he was really good at what he did, right?
So Andrew passed away in the spring of 2012, but his work and his legacy lived on for years after.
Inspire Your Kids To Win00:06:30
So he was able to expose Anthony Weiner for all of his, let's say, illegal activities, let's put it nicely.
And because of that, there were several federal investigations that were triggered in the years that followed, including seizures of laptops and personal information.
So allegedly, Anthony Weiner had a relationship with Huma Abedin as his wife or whatever.
And the FBI came and seized Anthony Weiner's laptop.
Now, you might remember in the fall, this is all thanks to Andrew Breitbart, by the way.
In the fall of 2016, boy, October of 16, like a couple days before the election, James Comey issues that famous memo saying that there's still an investigation ongoing into Hillary Clinton's emails.
Now, what was he talking about?
He was talking about material that was sourced directly from Huma Abedin, who is friends with Hillary Clinton, and triggered James Comey to write that letter that some people say made Donald Trump win that following Tuesday and Hillary Clinton lose.
So even after Andrew Breitbart passed, he was still defeating leftists and he helped get Donald Trump right up in 2006.
Back to the Acorn story, we had broken the story, released the tapes one at a time.
Of course, the media, it's an isolated incident.
You know, they got thrown out of the other offices.
And of course, my phone rang on that whatever day it was in September 2009, some 70 times.
The media would not stop.
They were going to personalize the story, make it about me.
At the time, no one knew who I was.
And Andrew said, Do not pick up that phone.
Do not answer that phone from the Washington Post or CNN.
They were trying to personalize the story, make it about you, so I didn't.
And then he went on Rush Limbaugh Show.
Andrew Breitbart wrote a column, Why James O'Keefe does not take phone calls from an intrepid CNN producer.
And he read it live on the air.
And I mean, my phone would not stop ringing because these journalists did not want to cover the story.
They wanted to make it about who is this guy.
So I never picked up the phone.
For the first three days, no one had any idea who I was.
Andrew Breitbart knew how to play the media, how to force them to do their jobs.
I just hired a producer from CNN, and he got up here and said, Do your jobs.
Andrew made them do their jobs.
And I would just say, thinking back on this whole idea of, you know, again, looking back at some of those old speeches, again, the 2012 CPAC speech, other ones out there where Andrew was weirdly prophetic and ahead of his time significantly, we're at a point now where, I mean, I remember back then when Republicans wouldn't fight the culture wars and they wouldn't get, you know, it felt like there were only a handful of us out here willing to ask tougher questions.
I think that you're seeing more and more people across the movement, across the party, et cetera, really getting engaged on all of these things.
I mean, it's a central part of the Republican Party now to challenge the defund the police, to challenge critical race theory.
Before, they wouldn't touch it with a 50-foot pole, never mind a 10-foot poll.
So I think that if anything, Andrew Breitbart is still winning the war.
It's an ongoing war.
Don't get me wrong.
We've got a lot of work to do.
But his vision is winning the war for the hearts and soul of the movement and the party and more broadly the country.
And I think that there is an end in sight, and I think we can't beat the left.
I, yeah, amen.
I loved Andrew Breitbart.
The greatest three years of my life were the three years I worked with him.
And I'll never forget that time.
And my life has changed because of him.
And he'll always be with us.
Charlie said that one of Andrew's favorite things to say was: politics was downstream from culture.
He would give a speech to young people, and he would say, You want to change this country?
You're a young conservative with a fire in your heart.
You want to make a difference?
Don't move to Washington, D.C. They'll ruin you there.
Move to Hollywood.
You really want to make a difference?
You move to Hollywood.
Let me tell you something.
This week, Jen Saki went on Roblo's podcast, because of course Roblo has a podcast, and revealed that what convinced her to get back into politics.
Did you see the story?
What convinced her to get back into politics was binging every season of the West Wing.
No, no, no, don't underestimate this.
We have legions of Chardonnay-sipping, Peloton-riding leftists in our American government right now that were inspired by Aaron Sorkin and the West Wing because they think it's real life.
And they think that this is what our country is about.
And guess what?
They're remaking it right now before our very eyes in the model of Aaron Sorkin's Little Pipe Dream.
You want to change the country?
You change it through Netflix.
You change it through Amazon Prime.
You change it through creating content that has nothing to do with news and politics and theology, but has everything to do with news and politics and theology.
And there's a lot of moms and dads in this room right now.
And their kids, when they're 12, 13, maybe getting into high school, they'll go to you and they'll say, Mom, Dad, I want to be an actor.
I want to be a writer.
I want to be a director.
I want to be in the arts.
And you're going to say, nope, nope, nope.
My kid's going to be a lawyer.
My kid's going to be a politician.
My tid's going to go into investment banking.
Because, yeah, we need more bankers and politicians and lawyers in our world.
You wonder why all of the drech you see from Hollywood is liberal and progressive and leftist and Marxist and undermines this country?
Because all the people who were making that content, they had parents who supported their kids and said, yeah, go into the arts.
So you want to follow Andrew Breitbart's legacy and really pick up what he had to say?
Inspire your kids and don't say no to them because that is truly how we'll change this country.
Thank you so much for your time today.
Thank you, gentlemen.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com and support us at charliekirk.com slash support.
Thank you so much for listening.
God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.