The Charlie Kirk Show - Marijuana and Mass Psychosis—A Contrarian Take with Alex Berenson
Aired: 2022-06-09
Duration: 35:24


=== Cannabis and Violent Crime (13:32) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey, everybody.
[00:00:01]  Today in the Charlie Kirk Show, is weed good for you?
[00:00:04]  A contrarian take on marijuana with Alex Berenson, author of Tell Your Children, and then Charlie Hurt, not Charlie Kirk, Charlie Hurt, great American.
[00:00:14]  We have a good conversation about what's happening in our country.
[00:00:17]  Really fun, long overdue.
[00:00:19]  Email me, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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[00:00:36]  Buckle up, everybody.
[00:00:37]  Here we go.
[00:00:38]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:00:40]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
[00:00:42]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:00:46]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:00:49]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:00:50]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:00:51]  His spirit, his love of this country.
[00:00:53]  He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
[00:00:58]  Turning point USA.
[00:00:59]  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.
[00:01:08]  That's why we are here.
[00:01:11]  Brought to you by Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage.
[00:01:14]  For personalized loan services, you can count on.
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[00:01:23]  With us right now is Alex Berenson, who deserves a lot of credit for his research throughout the entire pandemic and kind of being a contrarian data-focused voice, which I think he deserves just our praise because it came at great cost for him personally and professionally.
[00:01:40]  Alex, welcome back to the program.
[00:01:42]  Charlie, thanks for having me.
[00:01:43]  Alex, I want to talk to you about a different book, though, than your commentary on COVID.
[00:01:48]  And it's just interesting because our audience has mixed views on this.
[00:01:51]  My view is pretty well known.
[00:01:53]  I'm not a fan of marijuana or weed.
[00:01:55]  I think that there's an untold story around the consumption of marijuana that isn't always highlighted in the media.
[00:02:02]  You wrote a book called Tell Your Children, The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness and Violence.
[00:02:08]  Tell us about the arguments you make in the book.
[00:02:10]  Tell us why you wrote the book.
[00:02:12]  And did you come into like beginning with any sort of opinion before you went on your research journey?
[00:02:17]  Sure.
[00:02:18]  So Tell Your Children came out in 2019, about three and a half years ago now, almost.
[00:02:23]  And I wrote it over the previous couple of years.
[00:02:27]  My wife is a psychiatrist, a forensic psychiatrist, actually.
[00:02:31]  So that means she deals with the criminally mentally ill mainly.
[00:02:35]  And she had seen a lot of patients who had committed crimes under the influence of cannabis and sometimes other drugs too, and sometimes alcohol.
[00:02:47]  But cannabis really was the thread that was common in all of these.
[00:02:52]  So she encouraged me to look at this connection.
[00:02:56]  And, you know, I'd been a reporter for the New York Times for 10 years and I'd covered mainly the pharmaceutical industry, but I really didn't have much of a view about cannabis legalization.
[00:03:07]  I'd used a handful of times in my life, but it was not a drug that I'd used a lot or cared particularly about either way.
[00:03:15]  And what I found was that she was right.
[00:03:18]  Of course, she was right.
[00:03:19]  She treated these people and knew what she was looking for and knew what had happened.
[00:03:25]  But there's a huge body, a huge and growing body of scientific research that cannabis really is dangerous to a lot of people's mental health.
[00:03:34]  That, you know, it's not just that it can sap your motivation or make you sort of fat and lazy, these sort of these tropes about stress.
[00:03:44]  It's that if you use too much, especially at a young age, if you start at a young age, if you start in your teens, you're early to mid-teens, and you use heavily, and it is addictive.
[00:03:55]  So people will, you know, a lot of people wind up using more than they think they're going to use.
[00:04:00]  You can have psychotic episodes.
[00:04:03]  And you can sometimes, some people, probably people with a genetic predisposition, although it's not always clear, may develop permanent psychosis, a permanent psychotic condition known as schizophrenia after using cannabis.
[00:04:16]  And this is, you know, this is very hotly debated outside the scientific community, but I would say it's not that heavily debated inside the scientific community.
[00:04:27]  I would say the main debate inside the scientific community is not whether or not this happens, but how frequently it happens and whether or not, you know, there's a genetic predisposition causing it to happen.
[00:04:39]  So yeah, just really quick, just, you know, I'm a layman when it comes to marijuana.
[00:04:43]  I've never used it, so my knowledge is very limited.
[00:04:45]  I do know that it kind of goes all across the map, though.
[00:04:48]  I know people that use marijuana and they get super anxious when they use it and people that have a totally different experience.
[00:04:53]  Why is that?
[00:04:54]  I mean, that is a very complex drug.
[00:04:57]  It's much more complex than alcohol.
[00:04:59]  Yes.
[00:05:01]  And like a lot of drugs, and also it's changed a lot.
[00:05:04]  And this is something that's gotten a lot of attention in the last several years that I try to highlight in the book that I think people are finally waking up to.
[00:05:12]  It really is not the same product it was 20 years ago or even 10 years ago.
[00:05:17]  What's happened is that with legalization, the people who promoted legalization always said, oh, this is going to help make a broad variety of product available to people.
[00:05:28]  There's going to be low strength cannabis, medium strength, high strength.
[00:05:31]  And that's really based on the amount of THC that is in the cannabis.
[00:05:34]  It turns out that was wrong.
[00:05:36]  It turns out that most people who use a regularly want very high strength cannabis.
[00:05:41]  Or they want to just smoke or vape pure THC, or they want edibles, which are, you know, which are basically pure THC in some kind of cooked form.
[00:05:51]  And so that's what the industry's provided.
[00:05:53]  You know, we're very good in this country at giving people what they want.
[00:05:56]  And what they want is really strong cannabis.
[00:05:59]  And unfortunately, although as you would expect, the stronger the drug, the more likely you are to have severe side effects.
[00:06:06]  And so that's been another change.
[00:06:08]  We've gone from people who don't use, or I think people, you know, I'm in my 40s, people my age or older have a vision of this drug as, oh, you know what?
[00:06:16]  Like it's a little spliff that gets passed around at parties.
[00:06:19]  Or, you know, maybe there's a bong that I smoked once in college at a party or something like that.
[00:06:24]  That's not what this is now.
[00:06:25]  This is something that this, this, this relatively small group, although it's millions and millions of people, are waking up and using day after day after day.
[00:06:34]  And they are going, I mean, they are going through life basically high on, you know, on THC for in some cases, essentially their whole lives.
[00:06:43]  And that has had really harmful effects on a lot of them.
[00:06:48]  So let me ask you, there's some people that say, but there's potential medical benefits or natural benefits.
[00:06:54]  Where do you fall down?
[00:06:56]  Where do you fall in that argument?
[00:06:57]  Because that seems to be like a primary kind of point of persuasion for a lot of the marijuana advocates.
[00:07:03]  So I go into this and tell your children quite a bit.
[00:07:05]  This was a brilliant strategy by the industry.
[00:07:08]  Okay.
[00:07:08]  If the industry and drug legalizers had said, hey, this is just another recreational intoxicant.
[00:07:13]  It's like alcohol and we should legalize it on that basis.
[00:07:17]  They wouldn't have gotten very far.
[00:07:19]  What they did was they said, oh, you know, it can cure cancer.
[00:07:23]  And, you know, if you're wasting away from HIV or AIDS, it can help you.
[00:07:28]  And, you know, if you have all sorts of colitis, it's great for that.
[00:07:31]  They said it.
[00:07:31]  They made a bunch of like really insane medical claims.
[00:07:34]  I mean, the claims basically are that this thing cures everything.
[00:07:38]  And basically, unfortunately, when cannabis and THC and the chemicals in cannabis are tested rigorously, most of the time they don't work to cure anything.
[00:07:50]  My surprise, actually my greatest surprise about this is they don't really even they don't really even work on pain.
[00:07:56]  And you would think that because the drug gets you high, it would work very well on pain, but because it enhances sensation, that's actually probably not something you want to do when you're in pain.
[00:08:06]  So marijuana is not a very good medicine for almost any of the conditions it's touted for.
[00:08:11]  There's a couple minor exceptions um and, by the way, it's not really a good anti-anxiety drug uh, for most people, because The unfortunate thing about anti-anxiety drugs, and this is true of benzodiazepine, it's true.
[00:08:23]  I mean, drugs like Xanax or Valium, people who use them and then try to stop using them often have very bad rebound anxiety.
[00:08:30]  And that can happen with cannabis too.
[00:08:32]  So you use, you feel better, but then you stop and you get even more anxious than you were before.
[00:08:38]  So as a medicine, cannabis is essentially useless for most for most conditions.
[00:08:45]  As a political stance, though, this was brilliant.
[00:08:48]  And so that got that built up this sort of for-profit industry in places like California.
[00:08:54]  And then they started agitating and saying, you know what?
[00:08:58]  It's silly to make people go get a medical marijuana card when we know most of these people are just using to get high.
[00:09:03]  Anyway, let's legalize.
[00:09:05]  And that became a winning argument.
[00:09:07]  There's so many questions I have.
[00:09:09]  We have about a minute remaining.
[00:09:10]  What is the data showing us from states that are legalizing?
[00:09:13]  Are younger and younger children using it?
[00:09:15]  Are we seeing other disturbing like hospitalization trends or self-harm trends?
[00:09:20]  I know we can't do the correlation thing, but to the best that we can.
[00:09:23]  There's some of that.
[00:09:24]  I mean, you know, there's some evidence.
[00:09:27]  What there really is evidence of is heavy use in those states.
[00:09:31]  And I mean, we haven't talked about the crime issue at all, but one of the promises made was, oh, if we legalize the cannabis, then police officers won't have to worry about users and they'll be able to focus on serious crime and we'll see a decrease in violent crime.
[00:09:46]  Well, as you know, in the United States, there's been a terrible increase in violent crime and murder in the last couple of years.
[00:09:51]  And in many of the cities that were early legalization, it's actually been even worse.
[00:09:56]  And that's an even harder correlation to make.
[00:09:58]  And we'd have to have a whole nother segment about it.
[00:10:01]  But because psychosis and severe mental illness are major drivers of violent crime, there's a real case to be made that some of this increase is being driven by legalization.
[00:10:18]  Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
[00:10:20]  Look, we may have been able to stop the Ministry of Truth, but we know they'll be back with something else.
[00:10:26]  We are facing the biggest threat to your constitutional rights in our lifetime.
[00:10:30]  Look, I am proud to support and partner with Patriot Mobile, America's only Christian conservative cell phone provider.
[00:10:36]  The folks at Patriot Mobile make it easy for you to be able to stop funding these left-wing carriers who give all their money to groups like BLM and all these awful places and instead have a cell phone company in alignment with your values.
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[00:11:16]  That's patriotmobile.com slash Charlie or call 972 Patriot.
[00:11:22]  Alex, can you tell us a little about the crime issue?
[00:11:25]  You kind of mentioned that briefly.
[00:11:26]  Sure.
[00:11:27]  So the issue about marijuana and crime is, I would say, even more controversial than the issue around marijuana and psychosis because people, you know, marijuana supporters are always saying, oh, it just makes people mellow.
[00:11:39]  And the only thing that I've ever murdered is a bag of Doritos.
[00:11:43]  You hear all this stuff.
[00:11:44]  And again, marijuana is much more complicated than alcohol.
[00:11:49]  You know, alcohol affects most people in more or less the same way.
[00:11:52]  It disinhibits people.
[00:11:53]  And so, you know, you bars get loud, and sometimes, you know, and sometimes what might have been a verbal argument turns into a fight.
[00:12:00]  What might have been a fight turns into an aggravated assault.
[00:12:03]  It's it sort of takes things up a notch.
[00:12:05]  Marijuana can cannabis can make people very relaxed and mellow, but it can also make them agitated and paranoid.
[00:12:12]  And when people get paranoid, really paranoid, and certainly when they're psychotic, they can lash out and they do so in ways that are very unpredictable.
[00:12:21]  So, so psychosis and schizophrenia are connected with a lot of violent crime.
[00:12:29]  The best estimates are that, you know, anywhere between if you're a person with schizophrenia and your illness is uncontrolled, you have between a five and 20 times, five and 20 times increased risk for severe violence, for committing severe violence.
[00:12:46]  And so, so, given that, it is, and given that we know that cannabis can produce this paranoid and sometimes psychotic reaction in people, there's there's reason to believe, and it's supported in data, that cannabis can drive violent crime.
[00:13:05]  Um, and so, and you see it, I mean, I mentioned it and tell your children, I mentioned many, many cases where we, you know, where that where there's a apparently a clear causal link, but more than that, you're seeing it in sort of national and state level data that the legalization of cannabis has certainly not been linked with a decrease in violent crime, it's been the opposite.
[00:13:27]  And look, violent crime is a very complicated phenomenon, it's multifactorial.

=== The Eight Gender Solution (14:16) ===

[00:13:32]  Um, you know, people on the left will say, Oh, it's just guns, people on the right say, No, it's just you know that the police have been undercut.
[00:13:39]  You know, it's it's a whole bunch of factors.
[00:13:41]  And I'm certainly not saying that cannabis legalization is the only factor or even the primary factor.
[00:13:46]  But what I am saying is that when you look at specific cases and at broader trends, you can see a connection here.
[00:13:54]  So, shifting gears really quick, tell us about your lawsuit with Twitter.
[00:13:57]  Sure.
[00:13:58]  So, so by the way, one great thing about tell your children is that the book is three and a half years old and it's sort of just come back to life.
[00:14:05]  So, when you write some stuff that's true and nonfiction, it can come back.
[00:14:10]  And that is actually giving me a really good feeling about pandemia, which is my book about what we did with COVID the last couple of years and what we should have done and the mistakes that we made, and the fact that we shouldn't have locked down or shut schools.
[00:14:23]  So, as you know, I've been a contrarian about the vaccines, just like I've been a contrarian about cannabis.
[00:14:29]  And I've argued that we don't have great evidence that the vaccines are working very well.
[00:14:33]  That's certainly infection and transmission, they don't reduce at all.
[00:14:37]  It looks like they may even increase your susceptibility to being infected.
[00:14:42]  Okay, all of that led me or led Twitter to kick me off last August.
[00:14:48]  I sued Twitter in December, and in April, April of this year, I got the very good news that my lawsuit had survived the motion to dismiss.
[00:14:56]  And this was a Clinton judge who said, You know what?
[00:15:00]  This guy's got a case, I'm going to let it go forward.
[00:15:02]  So, right now, I, and this is a public, uh, you know, this has been reported.
[00:15:07]  I'm negotiating with Twitter about a settlement that, you know, and I can't talk about what the terms might be, but I'm also proceeding with this lawsuit.
[00:15:16]  And one of the things that the lawsuit is going to allow me to do is see whether or not there were communications from the federal government and from drug companies and everybody else to Twitter about me.
[00:15:27]  Wow.
[00:15:27]  So, when we have these debates about Section 230 and people say, oh, you know, these companies, these social media companies, whether it's Twitter or Facebook or anybody else, are just acting as censors for the federal government.
[00:15:39]  Well, I've got a way to see that now.
[00:15:41]  And it's going to happen very rapidly.
[00:15:43]  It's going to happen before Elon Musk could possibly take over Twitter, even before, you know, even assuming the deal goes through.
[00:15:50]  So I'm in this, like, I'm in a unique position, and I am aggressively raising money for this.
[00:15:55]  I have a GoFundMe that's got my name on it, and it's called Fight Social Media Censorship.
[00:16:01]  And you can read about what I'm doing on my sub stack, which is unreported truths, is what it's called, unreported truths at Substack, because Substack does allow free speech from both the right and the left.
[00:16:13]  But that's, you know, that's where I am.
[00:16:15]  I'm very, you know, excited is the wrong word, but as somebody who's, you know, who's been a reporter for a long time, I'm pleased to have the opportunity to, you know, to get a look under the potential censorship that the government may have driven in my case.
[00:16:30]  I don't know.
[00:16:31]  I'll find out and I'm going to move forward.
[00:16:33]  I think it's there.
[00:16:34]  Thank you so much.
[00:16:35]  Book is tell your children and pandemia and support his substack, which will lead you to his lawsuit.
[00:16:40]  You're a great American, Alex.
[00:16:41]  Thank you so much.
[00:16:42]  Thank you, Charlie.
[00:16:46]  A war is being waged on reality, everybody, and the left is leading the charge.
[00:16:50]  Their radical gender ideology has seeped into children's classrooms, into medical terminology, and into our everyday life.
[00:16:55]  It's producing a generation of psychological infants and confused young people.
[00:16:58]  Not only that, but this radical ideology is trying to erase the people who brought us all into the world, women.
[00:17:04]  Now, Matt Walsh of the great Daily Wire is taking matters into his own hands.
[00:17:08]  He recently embarked on a journey around the world to ask one simple question: What is a woman?
[00:17:12]  And you'd be surprised not only how few are capable of answering, but also how many have a completely twisted idea of what a woman is.
[00:17:18]  Thankfully, he got his whole experience on film.
[00:17:20]  The documentary, they don't want you to see what is a woman.
[00:17:22]  You can check it out today at dailywire.com/slash Charlie.
[00:17:25]  Radical gender ideology has a not-so-secret agenda, and this film exposes it all.
[00:17:30]  Check out what is a woman at dailywire.com/slash Charlie.
[00:17:34]  That is dailywire.com/slash Charlie.
[00:17:39]  With us is Charlie Hurt, the smart and great American.
[00:17:42]  Charlie, welcome to the program.
[00:17:44]  Thanks for having me.
[00:17:45]  But it's so funny.
[00:17:46]  I get it too.
[00:17:47]  And when I hear your name, I'm like, what?
[00:17:49]  What's going on here?
[00:17:50]  But then the worst for me, and this isn't a problem for you because I'm not a step up from you.
[00:17:57]  But when I get introduced as Charlie Kirk, I'm like, wait, wait, wait a minute.
[00:18:00]  I'm not that smart.
[00:18:02]  I'm actually the dumb version of Charlie Kirk.
[00:18:04]  So this is going to be like this interview is going to be really disappointing if you're expecting Charlie Kirk and you get Charlie Hurt.
[00:18:11]  I don't know about that.
[00:18:12]  You know, dumb people, even dumb people need representation, a voice in Washington.
[00:18:17]  And that's what I'm here for.
[00:18:18]  Very funny.
[00:18:19]  So, Charlie, there's a lot of different stories that we can unpack.
[00:18:22]  You know, I just want to kind of ask you a broader question.
[00:18:24]  Where do you think we are, you know, politically?
[00:18:27]  I did a whole kind of monologue, I guess you could say, a thesis, trying to basically making the argument that we're in this final phase, that conservatives were not falling for the bait from the left anymore.
[00:18:38]  We don't care what names they call us.
[00:18:40]  And basically, the left, in a kind of last move of desperation, they become just basically enamored with brute force, punishing and politicizing, you know, the criminal justice system against their political opponents.
[00:18:52]  Where do you think we are just from a 35,000-foot view?
[00:18:56]  Wow.
[00:18:57]  I think that you, I think we're actually on the exact same spot on this.
[00:19:04]  I think we are emerging into sort of this like post-leftist world.
[00:19:10]  And I hate to, I almost hate saying this publicly because I don't, I hate, I don't want to sound pollyannish.
[00:19:18]  And I'm not trying to sound hopeful, but I can't help but be hopeful because you captured perfectly.
[00:19:28]  I think that all of their ideas have run their course.
[00:19:33]  And sadly, it's taken us not Destroying education, destroying the treatment of lots of people that the left claims to care about, whom they do not care about, for them to kind of run out of excuses.
[00:19:50]  And every time something big comes up and they come up with a new grand idea, whether it's global warming or racism or guns, every single one of those issues, if you think about it, if you look at it the right way, none of them are solutions.
[00:20:06]  They're all excuses and distractions from their miserable failure on everything they've ever promised, whether it's ending poverty or whatever it is that they claim to care about and claim to want to have a solution to, but they don't.
[00:20:28]  The only thing they have, the only solution they have is a solution for giving themselves more power and more money taken from you.
[00:20:38]  And I think you're exactly right.
[00:20:39]  I really do think we've reached the end of it.
[00:20:41]  And I give President Trump so much credit for this because I think, and the question that we always have is: well, I wish he wouldn't tweet, or I wish he wasn't such a jerk.
[00:20:54]  I don't know that we get to the spot without him being in jerk.
[00:20:58]  And you're right.
[00:20:59]  Tell us why, because some of our audience will disagree.
[00:21:02]  Tell us why you think that's the case.
[00:21:05]  Because our reflexive reaction to any problem, whether it's a school shoot, whatever, is to assume that the people we're arguing with are operating from a place of good faith and that they want to accomplish the same thing we do, like the humanist thing to do, right?
[00:21:26]  And if you start, you've lost the fight, if you're dealing with these people, you lost the fight the minute you make that assumption.
[00:21:34]  And that's just what decent people do.
[00:21:36]  And let's be clear: our side is filled with decent people.
[00:21:40]  And so we make that mistake.
[00:21:42]  The other side is not filled with decent people.
[00:21:45]  There are a lot of decent people that fall for it.
[00:21:50]  But the people that are guiding the sort of thinking on the left, these are not opportunities to fix problems.
[00:21:57]  These are opportunities to seize more control.
[00:22:00]  And so you have to be a single-minded a-hole like Trump to sit here and stand up for that stuff and to fight it.
[00:22:10]  And from the beginning, say, no, you're not being an honest broker on this.
[00:22:14]  You're actually trying to do something.
[00:22:16]  You're either trying to distract or you're trying to gather, you know, figure out some way to exploit the strategy for your own personal gain.
[00:22:25]  And that's not the way this is going to work.
[00:22:28]  The way this is going to work is to have actual common sense, thoughtful, intelligent approaches to things that actually, you know, forever mindful of our constitutional rights and how not to make the quote-unquote solution even worse than the problem that you're supposed to, you know, that we want to solve and that our opponents don't even want to solve.
[00:22:57]  That's so well said.
[00:22:58]  And so we're kind of in this final moment.
[00:23:01]  You've been in the conservative movement for quite a while, longer than I have.
[00:23:04]  Are you starting to see a difference in how conservatives, especially kind of those conservatives that could go either way, either be with the base on certain issues or be with kind of the chamber and the moderates?
[00:23:16]  Are you starting to see kind of a turning moment where the kind of attacks from the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the kind of weaponizing of name-calling matters less?
[00:23:27]  Are you starting to see a sea change in that regard?
[00:23:31]  I think so.
[00:23:32]  And it's not just weaponizing, you know, it's weaponizing basic known facts.
[00:23:38]  And the perfect example is this idea.
[00:23:42]  And even you and I have fallen for it.
[00:23:44]  We get into these arguments with people about whether there are two genders or 18 genders, right?
[00:23:51]  And the mere fact that we're having that discussion means that we're not having a serious rational discussion about anything.
[00:23:59]  We're just, and also, by the way, we look ridiculous engaging in a, you know, mud-smearing fight with an idiot.
[00:24:12]  I mean, no one comes out of that looking intelligent.
[00:24:16]  And if that's what happens, then they win, because then they go to the next thing.
[00:24:20]  And I do think that it's so, and some, and part of the reason that they do that, of course, is so that rational, common sense, good-meaning Americans tune out.
[00:24:33]  And they just, they assume that political discussions are about whether or not there are eight genders.
[00:24:39]  I mean, you know, the University of Virginia, one of the most prestigious medical universities in the world on the planet, teaches that there are eight genders, offers you eight genders when you enroll.
[00:24:53]  This is what we're up against.
[00:24:55]  And that kind of thing, when people think that that's what political discussions are about, then good people walk away from that and they say, you know, I got to teach my kid how to play baseball.
[00:25:09]  So this is, I'm just going to leave this alone.
[00:25:13]  I'm going to leave this for the morons to discuss.
[00:25:16]  And then, of course, you and I are left, you know, doing our best to sort of have to sort through the argument because, yeah.
[00:25:25]  And unfortunately, we look like idiots because we're like, because if there is any bigger moron than somebody who thinks there are eight genders, it's the person trying to correct that idiot, you know?
[00:25:39]  It's like arguing with, whatever.
[00:25:41]  But anyway, so, but I do, I really do, I do think that that stuff is wearing through.
[00:25:47]  And, you know, obviously what we saw with the recall of Chesapeake in San Francisco, and even bigger than that, of course, in a lot of ways, was the recall of those school board members there.
[00:26:04]  And honestly, I think if Glenn Young were on the ballot today as opposed to six months ago, it was shocking to me that Terry McAuliffe got 48% of the vote in Virginia in my home state.
[00:26:18]  It's just appalling.
[00:26:19]  I don't understand it.
[00:26:20]  Just like it's shocking that millions of people did vote for Joe Biden.
[00:26:24]  But I think that if you were to have that election again today, I think that Young probably would have won by a whole lot more.
[00:26:34]  And once people start realizing, yeah, it really is as ridiculous as you think it is.
[00:26:41]  What they're doing really is as appalling as you think it is, then that accrues so that in a year from now, Glenn Young will have like 70%, you know, 60% approval rating in Virginia.
[00:26:56]  I really do believe that that's kind of, that's how this works.
[00:26:59]  It has to, or else the entire civilization falls apart, right?
[00:27:02]  I mean, these, and this is something you've written about before.
[00:27:05]  It really is kind of the tyranny of these fringe academic theories, kind of the ideologues.
[00:27:10]  And that's what you saw in San Francisco.
[00:27:12]  I mean, you could not have a more ideologically pure, and I put that in air quotes, than Boudin, right?
[00:27:18]  Abolish the police, don't have any sort of law enforcement whatsoever.
[00:27:23]  But it's kind of, we have to eventually come down to those pesky shackles of reality, don't we?
[00:27:27]  And isn't that kind of our great hope?
[00:27:29]  Yes.
[00:27:30]  And I'm so glad you used the word tyranny because the word tyranny is exactly, it's precisely the word that our founders would have used to describe exactly this.
[00:27:41]  Tyranny for them, yeah, they were concerned about tyranny of the government and tyranny of leaders.

=== Founders Fear Tyranny (06:22) ===

[00:27:48]  They were concerned about that.
[00:27:49]  But they were also, when they talked about tyranny, they talked about tyranny, the minority within the government.
[00:27:55]  But they also were talking about tyranny of a thug walking down the street willing to take your life, a citizen's life, for no reason or for his own selfish reasons.
[00:28:08]  To them, that was tyranny as well.
[00:28:10]  And the reason that they were so adamant about us being self-governed and having, say, for example, gun rights, as well as everything else, free speech rights and religious rights and all this kind of stuff, is that we ourselves are responsible for protecting ourselves against the tyranny of a thug walking down the street wanting to hurt us, our families, or our neighbors.
[00:28:35]  And we were able to, we have the right to stand up and stop that, which of course we didn't see in Uvalde, which is one of the unending tragedies of that situation.
[00:28:49]  Look, the world situation is getting worse every single day.
[00:28:52]  We're suffering from high inflation, outrageous gasoline and diesel prices, skyrocketing food prices, a bad economy, and so much worse.
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[00:30:15]  So Charlie, you know, as I travel the country and I talk to people, people are much more concerned about the open border, the destruction of their history and their culture, the fact they can't afford gas than kind of some of these debates happening in DC.
[00:30:29]  And I'm not trying to minimize any of the suffering of the families, obviously, neither Buffalo or Uvalde, but it feels to be a very DC-centric conversation.
[00:30:38]  Would you agree with that?
[00:30:40]  Yeah.
[00:30:41]  And, you know, again, you know, going back to what we were just talking about a minute ago, about how we approach these things from sort of a standpoint of decency and it automatically, you know, because we don't, we're horrified by what we saw.
[00:31:01]  And so you start from the standpoint of, oh my goodness, is there something I could have done?
[00:31:06]  Is there something I could have done?
[00:31:07]  It's just like anytime you read a bad story in the newspaper about something, a car accident, anything that happens, you say, is there something I could have done?
[00:31:14]  There's something we could have done to prevent that.
[00:31:16]  And you can't, it's a basic human emotion of decent people.
[00:31:21]  But the real people who are denigrating and belittling the pain of the families in Uvalde and Buffalo are the politicians who look at that and say, oh, well, I could have fixed this if we had done this, if you just let me do this.
[00:31:37]  No, no, that wouldn't have fixed it.
[00:31:38]  That wouldn't have prevented it.
[00:31:40]  You're a liar.
[00:31:41]  You lied.
[00:31:42]  And you're exploiting these children to advance your own twisted political agenda that doesn't fix the problem.
[00:31:51]  It doesn't do anything but help you and serve you.
[00:31:55]  They're the people that are being, that should be on the defensive.
[00:31:58]  They're not, of course, because they have no decency to them.
[00:32:04]  And no one ever calls them.
[00:32:05]  Yeah, and let me just...
[00:32:06]  Yeah, let me just interject really quick, though, Charlie.
[00:32:08]  This is very difficult for some conservatives, especially conservatives that have been around for 30 or 40 years, to agree with that we're not dealing with decent people.
[00:32:17]  I think there is a desire, or at least kind of a willingness is the wrong word, but they cannot get over the hump of being like, are we really dealing with the indecent?
[00:32:28]  How do you respond to that?
[00:32:30]  I mean, look what, again, let's go back to Donald Trump.
[00:32:35]  Look what they did for six years to Donald Trump.
[00:32:39]  And whether you like Donald Trump or not, or and whether you think he fed into it and made things worse, they really did spy on his campaign.
[00:32:49]  They really did use a whole of government approach to weaponize a Democratic campaign against him, both inside and outside of the government, to make up stories.
[00:32:59]  And they use the entire media to spin lies and tell fantastical lies and weave these completely unbelievably ridiculous conspiracy theories against him, all for their own political benefit.
[00:33:15]  But if you take all that apart and you go down to the basic sort of the platform of what the guy stood for and what he wants to do, the America First agenda, there's nothing controversial about it.
[00:33:27]  The reason the left, the reason Washington despised Donald Trump is not because he was radical, and it wasn't even because he was a bombastic jerk.
[00:33:37]  The reason they opposed him is because when you take all that away, his policies were so mainstream, he terrified them.
[00:33:46]  He terrified the left.
[00:33:48]  That's the same thing.
[00:33:50]  Sadly, he terrified a lot of Republicans in Washington who had their little feistoms built around lobbyists and staffers and all that kind of stuff.
[00:34:00]  And he was, and his simple approach, simple, practical, common sense approach, pro-America approach to every problem threatened them.

=== Bodyguard of Civilization (01:13) ===

[00:34:10]  And that's why, did the guy have to be a jerk?
[00:34:12]  I don't know how, I don't know any other way.
[00:34:15]  You can't deal with people like this nicely.
[00:34:18]  You don't hire a perfume salesman to do plumbing work when your toilet is plugged up.
[00:34:24]  No, or better.
[00:34:25]  Hire a plumber.
[00:34:27]  I called him in my RNC speech, you might remember, the bodyguard of Western civilization.
[00:34:32]  The bodyguard?
[00:34:33]  Yes, exactly.
[00:34:35]  It's a perfect description.
[00:34:36]  You do not hire a nice, courtly person in French cuffs and a dandy, you know, straw boater hat to do what needs to be done around here.
[00:34:48]  You don't hire a nice, sweet child to be your bodyguard.
[00:34:55]  Unfortunately, you got to hire a big, hairy, ugly, nasty, gross guy.
[00:34:58]  Tattooed guyguard.
[00:35:00]  Who might have served in a couple theaters of Iraq and knows how to do what's necessary?
[00:35:05]  And that's what we hired.
[00:35:06]  Yes, exactly.
[00:35:07]  Charlie Hurt, you got fired up.
[00:35:09]  I love it.
[00:35:09]  We'll have you back on soon.
[00:35:10]  Great to see you, Charlie.
[00:35:11]  Thanks, buddy.
[00:35:12]  Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
[00:35:14]  Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:35:16]  Thank you so much for listening.
[00:35:18]  God bless.
[00:35:20]  For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.