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May 26, 2022 - The Charlie Kirk Show
34:32
What's Driving America's School Shooting Epidemic with Steve Cortes
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Depoliticizing the Columbine Moment 00:15:13
Hey everybody, we go into detail about Robert Francis O'Rourke's barnstorming the stage like a teenage activist in front of Greg Abbott, Ted Cruz, and Dan Patrick while they are trying to basically give a eulogy.
It's disgusting.
And then we have Steve Cortez unpacking the tragedy in Texas as well as how does inflation play into all of this?
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Buckle up everybody here.
We go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
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This national tragedy has happened, and some lunatic emailed me.
Charlie, it's not a national tragedy.
I mean, just shut up.
It is, okay?
You had 19 elementary kids murdered in a classroom.
All right.
So, yes, it is.
That doesn't happen every day.
God forbid.
So we're kind of on the fly here.
And so the whole thesis that we had here was that Democrats are going to overly politicize this and make it all about themselves and their political agenda.
And as if right on queue, Robert Francis O'Rourke couldn't allow Governor Abbott to host a press conference on mental health and the facts related to it and barnstorms and bum, rushes the stage like an unhinged activist and starts screaming with his flailing arms, of which there's not a detectable ounce of testosterone or muscle mass on the entire being of the wannabe Hispanic Irishman.
Trust fund baby open border advocate, gun grabbing activist from El Paso Texas who, hell yes, is going to take away all your guns.
Soon to be three times failed candidate in Texas, where he can't win a Senate race, he can't win a presidential race and he's not going to win the governor's race.
And man again.
I have plenty of disagreements with Governor Abbott on a lot of things.
I don't think he acts fast enough.
I think he's been fine.
I don't think he's like Kemp, who's a total disaster.
But if you want to turn me into like a big Greg Abbott fan, congratulations.
Robert Francis O'Rourke.
You've done that, as you bum, rush the stage and make yourself look like a fool, make your entire political party look like nothing more than opportunists.
Okay, all right, let's just play it.
Excuse me, who's not to stand?
You're out of, you're out of line, and then embarrassing is right now and you're doing nothing.
No robbery to talk to a show.
This is totally predictable when you sir, you're out of line.
Sir, you're out of line.
Sir, you are out of line.
Please leave this auditorial.
If we come to a deal like this to make a political issue, I'm not quite sure what Robert Francis O'Rourke was saying, but he felt necessary to bum rush the stage, and Ted Cruz was just losing it.
And I think just kind of like the local sheriff came up and was like, You're an embarrassment.
How dare you do this?
We have not identified all the bodies.
Hasn't even been 24 hours.
And Robert Francis O'Rourke needs to turn it into a massive press conference.
And the radical left is going to reward him.
He's going to do all the press.
He's going to be on shows tonight.
Robert Francis O'Ork challenges Greg Abbott.
I'm just going to make a prediction right now.
You ready for this?
Connor, keep your eyes on all the propaganda rags.
I can't wait.
Robert Francis O'Rourke challenges Abbott to his face on failed gun policies.
Robert Francis O'Rourke goes up to Dan Patrick and Ted Cruz and shows them who's boss.
Robert Francis O'Rourke or Beto O'Rourke embodies the rage and the anger felt by millions.
So they're going to try to spin it into something that it isn't, where he's like politicizing a funeral.
What do you think about that?
It's like politicizing a funeral.
Yeah.
So Robert Francis O'Rourke said, it's on you.
The recount, which is a left-wing propaganda site, said, quote, in a striking moment, ridiculous.
Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O'Rourke interrupts Greg Abbott's press conference on the Uvalde shooting.
What did I tell you at the beginning of our broadcast here that they are going to force our hand now to defend our Second Amendment rights and our ability to protect ourselves?
They're forcing our hand into this.
We wanted to depoliticize this moment.
Occupy Democrat says, quote, breaking a courageous Beto O'Rourke interrupts a press conference held by Greg Abbott and NRA Stooges, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn in the Uvalde High School Auditorium.
It's like I predicted all this before I even saw it.
It's like word for word.
And they say, retweet to thank Beto.
Now, mind you, the interruption of speakers and all that is something we're very used to on college campuses.
What happens on college campuses doesn't stay on college campuses.
This clip is going to be widely circulated because it's going to kind of become a metaphor of people that actually are interested in governing our society, like Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick, who actually I thought give a very good summary of what happened, what could be done in response to it, and then just political children who bum rush the stage.
Now, look, Robert Francis O'Rourke, he could have had a press conference right outside a competing press conference, but he felt it necessary to go interrupt what was basically a quasi-funeral, a eulogy that was being given,
and also kind of like a fact and circumstance summary that was being tabulated for the people that are experiencing so much suffering in Uvalde, Texas.
I want to get to some more sound here.
Michael Moore, who has been increasingly irrelevant in recent years, decides to try to make him relevant by just opening his opening argument.
Not even 24 hours, not even everybody has been identified.
Michael Moore says we need a moratorium on all gun sales.
Play cut 81.
To nickel and dime this, I don't know if that's going to do it.
I think that we need some really drastic action here.
We need a moratorium, perhaps, on gun sales.
We need to, who will say on this network or any other network in the next few days, it's time to repeal the Second Amendment?
Oh, you can't say that.
Well, why not?
Why not?
So Michael Moore wants to make women and minorities who want to protect themselves against potential criminals more vulnerable.
The entire Second Amendment to be repealed.
Now, they've never had an understanding of what the Second Amendment is.
They've never had an appreciation for what the Second Amendment is.
Chuck Schumer kind of engages in the political circus created by the left, pleads for more gun control following the elementary school shooting in Texas.
Play Cut 80.
Please, please, please, damn it, put yourself in the shoes of these parents for once.
Maybe that thought, putting yourself in the shoes of these parents instead of in the arms of the NRA might let you wriggle free from the vice-like grip of the NRA, might free you to act on even a simple measure.
The problem in the Senate is simple: too many members on that side care more about the NRA than they do about families who grieve, victims of gun violence.
Now, what's interesting about this line of attack is how shallow it is.
Now, the National Rifle Association, interestingly, is having an event in Houston, and they're going to continue to have that event in the coming days.
That will obviously be contentious and met with lots of protests and opposition.
President Trump is going to speak.
Ted Cruz, I believe, is going to speak.
But it's not about the NRA.
I'm a big fan of the NRA.
I know they've been through some difficult times in recent years.
I know the people that run the NRA.
I think they've gotten a bad rap on a lot of different stuff.
I think they do a good job on a lot of different things, and I know they've been working through a lot of leadership challenges there.
But this idea that it's this kind of like clandestine organization and not the people behind the NRA, meaning the members, is a tactic by the left to act as if there is not widespread support for what the NRA is actually fighting for.
And I think that's a very important distinction to build out here.
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Somber day.
It's just hard to stop thinking about it.
I mean, once, you know, there's an interesting part of human psychology, which is you don't quite know to the depths of hell human beings can go.
Jordan Peterson talks about this a lot.
I'm by no means an expert at being able to articulate it like he can.
He gets a lot of heat from some people on the right for even talking about this.
But I mean, this idea of school shootings is actually somewhat of a recent phenomenon.
There was a school shooting back in the 30s or 40s that was just massive.
It was like 60 or 70 people.
I got my numbers wrong.
But for decades, there were almost no school shootings.
And then, of course, Columbine happened on April 20th, 1999.
And I don't like saying the names of the Columbine shooters.
It's just, it's just really sick.
I actually know their names.
I'm not going to say it because I just, it almost, I believe it further incentivized future people to do this.
And Columbine is famous not because of how many people died, which was tragic and terrible and awful, but it was famous kind of because it was first, is that it kind of totally took America by surprise in 1999, where in beautiful, you know, Columbine, Colorado, out of nowhere, you have these two people that come in and kill 13 and then, of course, both commit suicide.
Now, there was a ton of controversy because the police didn't intervene and they weren't allowed to intervene because of certain laws.
And that's one kind of wrinkle with what happened with here in Uvalde, which is this border patrol agent.
If he was just probably following it by the book, he had no jurisdiction as a federal agent to go in there.
But God bless him for doing it.
It's like, who cares what the book says when children are being massacred in a classroom?
The book probably says that as an armed federal border patrol agent, that's not his jurisdiction.
But he just went in as a concerned citizen with a gun and stopped the shooter.
Unfortunately, it wasn't soon enough, tragically.
But you kind of look at Columbine, unfortunately, Columbine created in the sickest and most darkest way imaginable an entire genre of new activity.
And so this is something that I want to kind of express and explore with you: which is once a new level of kind of human darkness is reached, it almost becomes something that other people then kind of see as a standard that then can be met.
And the point is that Columbine began this entire dark genre of shootings in America in schools.
No one did it before that.
I mean, they were like a one-off thing or a gang shooting or this, but this idea that I am oppressed and I am so mistreated by the world that I'm not just going to take my life, but I need to go take other innocent life.
Okay, yeah, the University of Texas massacre was in 1961, which would be an exception.
And there was another one like the 30s or 40s.
And of course, there's exceptions, but Columbine started this process, the rolling process.
And it's not a good thing that I'm 1966, thank you.
But it's not a good thing that I'm able to say that Columbine, Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois, Sandy Hook, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas in Parkland, Florida.
It's kind of one after the other.
You kind of get used to it.
I mean, the San Bernardino shooting, which wasn't a school shooting, it was kind of an Islamic terrorist deal where a guy walks into the streets and just starts shooting everybody.
A Fort Hood shooting, which was mislabeled as workplace violence.
But this whole idea of the school is something that, from a psychological perspective, really bothers us.
And it should, because school, especially elementary schools, is a metaphor for the innocent.
And it kind of goes to how dark can a human being go?
Not only can a human being take their own life, which is terrible and tragic and happens every single day in America.
But now the new thing is that I want to go take as many other people that have done nothing wrong with me.
And that's a new level of darkness that most human beings will ruin your day.
It could ruin your week.
You can't even process that.
You're like, how can I get that you have struggles with yourself, but get to a level where to cope with that in your final levels of existence and to go even darker and to go even just even deeper than that, to go take the lives of fourth graders.
Again, that's where the Sandy Hook and this one, this particular tragedy and horrific event are very similar in that regard.
And so you look at the Columbine shooting, which was kind of the beginning of now 23 years of these sorts of events that happen almost monthly.
Stop Using Banks That Hate You 00:03:08
And here's the point, though, is that it's not about the guns.
Is that in 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, we didn't really have mass school shootings.
They were very, very rare.
But it's as if it's psychologically, once this kind of dark activity got introduced into the zeitgeist of America of mentally disturbed, isolated, anti-social youth, they're like, oh, wait, I could do that and I could become famous too.
It's really out of control.
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With us right now is the great American patriot Steve Cortez.
Steve, we plan to talk about economics.
Guarding Against Vulnerable Young Men 00:07:21
We can talk about that, but obviously the kind of news of the day is unfortunately a tragedy in Texas.
You've made a good point, which is we protect our banks, our sporting events, and all of the things of value with armed guards and secret point entry and cameras.
But our schools, our most precious resource, our children, are very surprisingly vulnerable to evil infiltrations as we've seen in Texas.
Please expand that point.
So, Charlie, thanks for having me.
Look, the reality is that evil walks the earth, far too much of it these days, because I think in many ways we're a sick society, but that's a larger point.
The reality is because evil walks the earth, we need to guard the things that we treasure, the things that we really care about.
Unfortunately, as a society, I think we've decided that we really do treasure things like casino chips or gems in jewelry shops.
We do treasure adults who work in high rises that are extremely well guarded, yet we disregard what we should most value, and that is our children, the people that we should most cherish, the most vulnerable and innocent among us.
You know, I wrote this article.
I put up on my social media.
I wrote this article four years ago for CNN, right after the Parkland shooting.
Amazingly, CNN put it up.
I was a contributor to CNN at the time.
I did not expect they would get up.
We went back and forth, as you might imagine, quite a lot about the edits.
But the point is, I give them credit actually for putting it up.
And it really, it dawned on me.
I was still living in Chicago at that time, the day after the Parkland shooting, went into my Chicago high-rise where my office was, and I had to scan myself in three different times just to get into my building, which was guarded by a lot of security, some of it armed, cameras everywhere, armed guards, scan yourself three times to get to my office.
And it dawned on me: you know, if that kind of precaution is being taken for me and for adults who work in this office tower in Chicago, how is it possible that we don't take at least the same measures for children?
Why is there not a single entrance?
Why do they not scan themselves in or biometrically get scanned in?
Why do we not have armed security?
So I think as a society, we really need to decide what is it that we value most.
And if we truly do cherish children and we better, then let's start guarding them like it.
Let's guard them at least the way that we guard adults or chips in a casino.
So do you think there's a priority problem where our leaders rushed with great urgency to go send $40 billion to Ukraine, where we have so many problems here?
And look, I'm not saying that they could have anticipated this, but this has been a looming problem for years.
I mean, this has been something where you and I believe it's not a firearm problem, but that it's obviously a soul of an individual problem.
But also, it's okay.
Well, we know this is a problem now.
We know that this unfortunately is a sick and disgusting and sadistic, like weird, growing genre for social, anti-social teenage youth to try to go and create mass tragedy.
Wouldn't it make sense for Congress to maybe make a list of the hundred biggest problems facing America and do something to address that?
Maybe before, you know, giving all the money to Zelensky, $40 billion?
No, amen.
You know, Charlie, look, $40 billion, I would add, that we do not have.
Let's also remember that.
$40 billion that we are borrowing, making the inflationary spiral in this country even worse.
$40 billion that we are borrowing to send over to a very corrupt country.
Doesn't justify them being invaded, but to a very corrupt country to further escalate a regional battle that does not involve a U.S. national security interest.
But to your point about the perverse priorities of the permanent political class in America, it's true.
They couldn't have foreseen this tragedy, this evil that would unfold in Texas, but we know that there's been this unfortunate pattern going on for years.
And the priority has been interventionism and globalist warfighting and nation building around the world rather than fixing the systemic problems that we have here.
And, you know, also, Charlie, to your point, look, we've got to fix this sickness, this cultural and spiritual sickness in our society.
And I hope we get about that work.
But in the meantime, we know there's a vulnerability here.
We know that we have soft targets and that sick people, evil people, will seek out those soft targets.
My point is, let's not give them soft targets.
Let's harden these targets and make it difficult for any deranged person to attack our children.
So I didn't say this on air because I didn't want to speak it into existence, but I remember right when the lockdowns were beginning to end, I remember I turned to our team.
I said, there's going to be some very fanatical behavior, some, let's just say, suppressive type behavior in a way that we, it's just so off the wall.
And I don't want to kind of do the blame thing on ones because there are people that did crazy things before lockdowns and all that, obviously.
But it does beg the question: did the lockdowns and the social isolation and the over-medication of children and all of these interventions that were done to try to keep people safe, does it contribute to this?
And the numbers will pan out.
I pray that there's not more of these, but you had Buffalo last week and then you have the Waukesha a couple months ago.
I'm forgetting all of them, unfortunately.
What do you have to say?
Or what's your thought on how the lockdowns in the last couple of years very well might have created the preconditions or a foundation for some of this incredibly evil and demonic behavior to only be accelerated?
Well, you're right, Charlie, that there was a pre-existing problem, clearly.
So, it's not brand new, but it has been massively exacerbated, I do believe, yes, by the lockdowns and the psychological and societal damage that did to so many Americans, but particularly to young men, right?
So many young men were told, here, look at this screen all day and fed a steady diet of nonsense, which in many cases probably includes a lot of pornography, a lot of toxic culture at the least, through those screens, had their sports taken away.
Far too many of them, fatherless, don't have that role model in the home.
When you put all of that together, you know, look, idle young men or young men who don't believe that they have significant purpose in life can be incredibly dangerous.
You know, young men can be the most heroic figures in society.
They can also be the most dangerous.
And unfortunately, I believe that a long-term effect that we're going to deal with probably for many years, long-term effect of the lockdown, is going to be that a lot of vulnerable young men who are perhaps psychologically troubled anyway or sort of on the border of having problems or trauma were pushed into deep trauma because of what we did with the lockdown.
So the consequences are vast and far-reaching.
And I fear in this case, probably at least contributed to the sickness of this individual.
But again, number one, let's never do lockdowns again, clearly, obviously.
But number two, while we get about the work of healing the culture and building the culture of life, and I think all of us need to do that, whether it's in grand ways or in very small ways, in the meantime, Charlie, we know that our children are vulnerable.
Let's, and this is what we can do quickly.
That cultural work takes years and decades.
But what we can do quickly, what should take weeks, is to say we are going to guard our children the way we guard everything else that we value in life.
And that is just to me an imperative.
And, you know, to bring this back to that idea of $40 billion for Ukraine, the idea that we're going to guard their border, but disregard our own border.
And by the way, thank goodness, a customs and border patrol agent is one of the heroes of this terrible story in Texas, somebody who showed up apparently without backup, you know, just showed up because he's a brave citizen, wasn't on duty, showed up without backup, and thankfully prevented this tragedy from being even worse.
Losing Sight of Our Borders 00:04:24
How about we spend $40 billion on things like hardening schools, securing schools, and making sure that that border is secure?
I mean, how about that instead of escalating the conflict that has been going on for generations in the Black Sea region, instead of inserting America into that conflict and escalating it into a global risk?
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
That's so well articulated.
And I mean, we have a set of circumstances where the foreign almost takes a higher priority in the minds and the fascination of the American ruling class than the immediate or the domestic, whether they're just kind of bored with it or they don't, they consider it to be an annoyance.
I can't quite pinpoint it.
I'd love your thoughts on that.
Why is it that the American ruler is more fascinated with a war game far away?
I'm not saying Putin's all right.
Putin's a scumbag.
He's evil.
He's terrible.
Okay.
Right.
But there's like there's incredibly pressing concerns here on the homeland.
What is it in the psychology or the mentality of an American ruling elite where they care much more about the distant than the immediate?
It's a great question.
And my theory of this case, at least, is that when a lot of people, many of them with good intentions, when they go to Washington, D.C., because I've been very disappointed, by the way, in a lot of people who are normally, I think, sensible politicians, I'll name a couple, people like John Kennedy, the senator from Louisiana, for example, Mo Brooks, Congressman from Alabama.
These are people who normally are on our side.
They voted for this Ukraine aid.
I think the problem is a lot of them, people of good intentions, they go to Washington, D.C., and to an extent they go native to Washington.
What I mean by that is that they buy into the supposed expertise of the administrative state of Washington.
And there's nothing that that cabal, that Beltway Cabal, loves to do more than to view the world as a chessboard.
And I think there's a lot of hubris to that, right?
And because America has been the superpower of the globe for roughly a century and really the lone superpower for the last generation, you know, they've gotten a little bit intoxicated with that kind of power and they view the world as a chessboard for them to play.
And I'm talking about the administrators at the State Department in Foggy Bottom.
I'm talking also about the so-called foreign policy experts at the think tanks in Washington, D.C.
And then, of course, there's also a lot of money wrapped up in this.
So it's not just a matter of their arrogance.
It's also that it's very, very lucrative for defense contractors, for K-Street lobbyists.
So I think unfortunately, too many people when they go to Washington start to lose sight of the people who sent them to Washington, D.C. and instead want to look beyond our borders at the broader world and think that they can sort of fashion this world.
And it's really a hubris and an arrogance.
And it's incumbent on us, though, then, in these primary elections are going on right now to connect this back to politics and what we can do as regular citizens.
It's not enough to just complain.
We should do that.
We should be angry.
We should voice our opposition, but also vote and make sure my recommendation to all the patriots out there is in any primary race, ask these candidates, would you have voted for this $40 billion if you're not in office?
If you are in office, explain your vote.
Why did you?
Why didn't you?
This should be, to me, a foundational and critical differentiator among Republican candidates to decide who's truly an America first stalwart, who's truly a fighter, who's focused on the problems here at home, which again are intense.
That's exactly right.
Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
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The Inextricably Linked Crisis 00:04:24
So Steve, I want to get your thoughts on some economics that are happening right now.
I think we as conservatives tend to not believe that economics are the most important thing in dictating human behavior.
We believe that spiritual, social, family influences also are very important.
However, I want your thought on how inflation might also have unintended consequences in crime, in social isolation, in family units disintegrating.
Talk about how bad economic policy can also destroy the social fabric of a nation.
Sure.
And listen, I think that the cultural, the societal, the spiritual, and the economic are all inextricably linked.
I really do.
Not that I'm saying economics should take priority, but it's all linked.
And let me give you a concrete example of that.
Housing prices right now are absolutely out of control because of Biden's inflation.
And by the way, I would say Biden and Pelosi and Mitch McConnell's inflation, because I think all of them are basically equally complicit in the exorbitant borrowing and spending that has sent the prices of tangible physical goods soaring, whether it's a bushel of wheat, a barrel of oil, or a new home.
One of the consequences of homes being so expensive is that young families are largely priced out of that market.
So that is a deterrence to young people to get married, to have children, or if they have children, to have more children.
So there are very real cultural consequences of economics.
And regarding the economy, unfortunately, Charlie, the news is dismal.
And listen, I'm by nature an optimistic guy.
I wish I could report good news, but when it comes to the economy, it's almost all terrible.
And we have to view it, though, dispassionately.
And let me give you a couple of data points that I think are important.
Just last week, we had both Walmart and Target report earnings, and they were disasters.
Now, I'm not a fan of the management of either of those companies.
They can frankly go pound sand, but nonetheless, they are so big.
Walmart, by far, the biggest retailer, Target right there.
They are so big that it's an important read into the health of the U.S. consumer.
Both of them gave dreadful reports, and each company's stock had the largest single-day drop since 1987, since the historic crash of the 1980s.
In the case of Target, it lost 25% of its value in a single day.
Walmart CFO told us that they see a trend within their stores of people buying not gallons of milk, but half gallons.
Why?
Because they can't afford the full gallon.
So, American mothers are literally skimping on milk for their kids.
That's how much they are strained right now regarding their budgets.
So, we know that this isn't just an economic story.
We know that there's a lot of family fallout, a lot of stress and anxiety out there.
I'll tell you, I've been campaigning a lot in recent weeks, working for American First Candidates that I really support.
I know you and I, I think, sort of traded off with JD Vance in Ohio.
So, I barnstormed all of Ohio.
I've been back in my former home state of Illinois.
I've been in Georgia.
The first thing on everyone's mind, Charlie, when I meet regular Americans that I've met now thousands in these trips, the first thing on everyone's mind is inflation.
They have other concerns, to be sure: crime, public safety, immigration, a lot of things matter.
But number one on literally almost every person's mind is inflation.
And when they talk to me about it, I can sense the anguish in their voices.
I can see the concern in their eyes.
This is real.
It's tangible.
Americans are at a point now at a break point, I really would say, economically, where they can't afford the things that they need.
Forget about luxuries.
They can't afford the things that they need.
This is a created crisis.
This is what's important.
The Democrats and the complicit corporate media are trying to pass us off.
They're trying to blame it on Putin.
They're trying to say it's just bad luck of the business cycle.
Nonsense.
This is a created crisis.
Terrible policy got us here, particularly exorbitant borrowing and spending, as I mentioned, combined with an attack on American domestic energy production.
It created a confluence of factors that have resulted in massive runaway inflation.
So I think this is a foundational issue.
And we as a movement have to provide answers and an agenda to get out of this quagmire.
And if we do that effectively, I think we're going to elect the right people in the fall of 2022, which will then set the stage for electing the right president in 2024.
I hope it's Donald Trump.
But whether it is Trump or another America first fighter, that's the map out politically.
Well said.
Steve, thank you so much for joining us today.
Phenomenal wisdom and clarity as always.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Charlie.
Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thank you so much for listening.
God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.
com.
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