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We Shall Fight With Growing Strength
00:02:36
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| Hey everybody, today in the Charlie Kirk Show, we have Mike Davis from the Article 3 Project that joins us, and then David Sachs, who talks about Elon Musk and all of the terrific and important work that Elon is doing. | |
| Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com. | |
| Come to AmericaFest, Phoenix, Arizona, December 17th, December 18, December 19th, December 20 at amfest.com, A-M-F-E-S-T.com. | |
| Buckle up, everybody, here. | |
| We go. | |
| Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. | |
| Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus. | |
| I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. | |
| Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks. | |
| I want to thank Charlie. | |
| He's an incredible guy. | |
| His spirit, his love of this country. | |
| He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created. | |
| Turning point USA. | |
| We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. | |
| That's why we are here. | |
| Brought to you by Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage. | |
| For personalized loan services you can count on. | |
| Go to andrewandtodd.com, the wonderfulandrewandtodd.com. | |
| The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength. | |
| We shall go on to the end. | |
| We shall fight in France. | |
| We shall fight on the seas and oceans. | |
| We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. | |
| We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. | |
| We shall fight on the beaches. | |
| We shall fight on the landing grounds. | |
| We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. | |
| We shall fight in the hills. | |
| We shall never surrender. | |
| And if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry on the struggle until in God's good time, the new world with all its power and might step forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old. | |
| Winston Churchill, we will never surrender. | |
| Email us freedom at charliekirk.com and subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show podcast. | |
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The Laptop From Hell Scandal
00:06:33
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| It has been illuminating for me to read the emails during the break. | |
| There's a lot of people that are cynical and no longer going to vote. | |
| I understand the sentiment. | |
| I do not sympathize with the action. | |
| Do not allow your actions to be captured by negativity or cynicism or hopelessness. | |
| Joining us now is Mike Davis from the Article 3 Project to talk about the recent news at Twitter. | |
| Mike, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show. | |
| Thank you for having me. | |
| Mike, tell us about James Baker. | |
| So we got a bunch of Twitter files last week. | |
| Turns out they were incomplete because the then Twitter counsel was actually also worked with the FBI. | |
| Walk us through it. | |
| Yeah, Jim Baker's a bad dude. | |
| He was an Obama Justice Department senior appointee. | |
| And then Comey hired him as the general counsel of the FBI. | |
| He was up to his eyeballs and the Russian collusion hoax to try to take out President Trump in 2016. | |
| He showed up just in time to do that. | |
| He was there for a long time. | |
| Chris Ray fired him from the FBI. | |
| He went over as the deputy general counsel of Twitter. | |
| And lo and behold, he was involved again in another hoax, this time to work with the FBI to de-platform the New York Post, one of America's oldest newspapers, for their accurate reporting on the Hunter laptop story right before the 2020 election, where it showed that President Biden, his son Hunter, | |
| his brother James were on the Chinese and Ukrainian payrolls, clear foreign corruption that no doubt would have affected the outcome of the 2020 election. | |
| So Jim Baker was at Twitter when they de-platformed, censored, not only censored, they made it where you couldn't even post a link of the New York Post story. | |
| It was the most egregious censorship imaginable. | |
| And then when Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, is trying to get to the bottom of this, his lawyers are supposed to be working for him. | |
| And instead, it appears this Jim Baker was working against him to hide this material that would have implicated Jim Baker in this scandal instead of doing his clients' work. | |
| So you may have an ethics violation with Jim Baker here, but Elon Musk correctly fired him. | |
| So have the new and updated Twitter files now been posted by Taibbi that were not intercepted by Baker? | |
| I haven't seen those yet, but I don't think they have, Charlie. | |
| So that'll be interesting to see kind of what they are. | |
| Let's go to cut 38, Twitter. | |
| Tucker reports on the general counsel of Twitter. | |
| He's been vetting the Twitter files. | |
| I'm glad Elon caught this. | |
| Play Cut 38. | |
| This weekend, Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss, who's helping him do this reporting, found out that the general counsel of Twitter, that would be the former FBI general counsel, James Baker, had been vetting the documents before Taibbi and Weiss could see them. | |
| In other words, removing the ones that might incriminate him or the feds. | |
| So, Mike, this is the most important aspect of the Twitter file story, in my opinion, is how entrenched the federal government has been in Twitter and Facebook. | |
| What do we know? | |
| Yeah, I mean, remember, it was these 51 former Intel agents who came out and said that this was a Russian disinformation campaign, the Hunter Biden laptop reporting by the New York Post. | |
| This is egregious what they've done. | |
| And it shows that there is so much corruption at the FBI, the Intel communities, and big tech. | |
| And we need a house cleaning at all of those places at the FBI, Maine Justice, Intel communities, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple. | |
| It seems like Elon's doing it at Twitter, but we shouldn't have to rely on a benevolent billionaire doing the right thing here against all odds in order to do this. | |
| The richest man in the world is up against headwinds exposing this. | |
| That shows you how powerful the left is and how entrenched they are with every institution in America. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And so it's the ramifications of this go even beyond elections, but let's focus on that. | |
| How significant was the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story? | |
| I mean, I think it delegitimizes the entire 2020 election. | |
| Well, it shows, if you look at polling, if you ask focus groups in polling, if they would have changed their votes if they had known the laptop from hell, if they had known about that, if big tech and big government didn't collude to eliminate it from the American people's viewpoint before the election in 2020, it absolutely would have changed the outcome in the election. | |
| There's no question. | |
| That's why they did it. | |
| That's why they had to do, that's why they had to go to such extreme measures. | |
| They de-platformed the oldest newspaper in America. | |
| Not only did they censor the link, they didn't just put a warning on the link. | |
| They made it impossible to open the link from the New York Post. | |
| Yeah, so I mean, this is such a rep, it's so much repetition. | |
| Did they break any laws? | |
| Did Twitter break any laws? | |
| Well, if they're working with the FBI to censor reporting, yes, that's a civil rights violation. | |
| That's a First Amendment violation. | |
| That's a 1983 violation for the FBI, for government to work with private players to censor other private players, right? | |
| That's a First Amendment violation. | |
| They're doing it at the behest of the FBI. | |
| And so if you're doing it at the behest of the FBI, that's a First Amendment problem. | |
| That's a First Amendment violation. | |
| And who would be investigating that? | |
| I mean, I don't think the Biden Department of Justice is going to run into the arena to look into that. | |
| Well, I'll tell you that my former boss, Chuck Grassley from Iowa, along with Senator Ron Johnson, have been on this from day one. | |
| They just did Senator Grassley just in a floor speech today and put out more reports. | |
| House Republicans will now have subpoena power in January, and the state attorneys general have been looking at this. | |
| There have been lawsuits by state attorneys general that have been exposing this. | |
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Supreme Court Insulation from Politics
00:07:59
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| This is not going to go away. | |
| This is a massive scandal that's not going away. | |
| This is one of the biggest scandals we've had since Watergate. | |
| You have the FBI working with big tech to censor one of our oldest newspapers in America so they can throw the election for their preferred candidate. | |
| It doesn't get more CCP than that. | |
| I just don't think they care in the sense of they knew what they were doing when they were doing it. | |
| And they did it because they knew if they didn't do it, Joe Biden would not have become president. | |
| And so they sucked it up, did what was necessary, ends justify the means, very Machiavellian for them. | |
| And they basically said, look, eventually this might come out. | |
| It might not come out, but we got what we wanted. | |
| We robbed the bank. | |
| We pulled it off. | |
| The heist has been done and there will be no undoing it. | |
| It's one of the great things. | |
| In the meantime, they're using the full force of the Justice Department, including the FBI, to go after every Trump supporter, every Trump advisor, even President Trump for non-crimes. | |
| And so we absolutely have two systems of justice in America, one for the left and one for the rest of us. | |
| And until we start getting smart and serious about winning elections, winning election season, this is going to keep happening. | |
| We need to win elections. | |
| It's well said. | |
| Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here. | |
| Our great country was founded on the principle that all men are created equal. | |
| But far too many of our nation's colleges and universities, including those Ivy League schools, continue to insist on using race as a factor of admission. | |
| The Supreme Court is deciding a case on this right now. | |
| But there's a unique American college that does not discriminate based on race. | |
| It never has and never will. | |
| It's Hillsdale College. | |
| Hillsdale was founded in 1844 to educate all people, irrespective of nationality, color, or sex. | |
| It continues the policy today, admitting students on their strength of their character, ability, and intentions, not their heritage or background. | |
| My friend Larry Arn, the president of Hillsdale College, recently published an article explaining Hillsdale's colorblind policies and its related refusal of government funding, even indirectly inform a federal student aid. | |
| Read it for yourself at charlie4hillsdale.com. | |
| After you read it, you may want to support Hillsdale with a year-end gift. | |
| So go please read Dr. Larry Arn's article at charlie4hillsdale.com, charlie4hillsdale.com. | |
| Mike, let me ask you, there is a rather underreported story here, which is the Supreme Court wrestles with Republican bid to transform U.S. elections. | |
| I'm not sure how read up you are on this, but it is a Supreme Court. | |
| Let me get the exact name of the Supreme Court case. | |
| It is about whether or not state legislatures are going to be able to have any say. | |
| I'm not sure what the name of the case is. | |
| Are you familiar with what I'm talking about? | |
| I am. | |
| It's the Harper case that's being heard today in the Supreme Court. | |
| And basically, the case is this. | |
| Under the U.S. Constitution, the state legislatures decide the time, place, and manner of federal elections. | |
| That's the elections clause, along with state legislatures determine how the president is elected. | |
| That's the electors clause. | |
| So elections clause and electors clause. | |
| That is set in the Constitution for the state legislatures. | |
| Democrats don't like that because Republicans control a majority of state legislative seats and state legislative houses around the country. | |
| And so they want to have their Democrat-appointed state Supreme Court justices and their Democrat-appointed commissioners around the country redraw house races, redraw house seats after redistricting or determine that the election rules, like for example, using COVID to unconstitutionally change election laws around the country and go to all-male ballots or just change the rules generally. | |
| In order to change the election rules for federal elections, it has to be done by the state legislatures or Congress, and that's it. | |
| And so that's what this court, that's what this case is finally going to decide. | |
| How do you anticipate it being ruled? | |
| I think it's going to be six to three with the six Republican appointed justices. | |
| It should be nine to nothing, but the left-wing justices are pure results-oriented partisans. | |
| And so they'll want to go, they'll rule the way that gives Democrats more power. | |
| But if you look at the constant, the Democrats call this the state. | |
| They call it the state, what the state legislative theory, some theory. | |
| They call it a theory, which is nonsense. | |
| It's the elections clause in the Constitution. | |
| This should be nine-nothing. | |
| This is not hard. | |
| I mean, it's in the Constitution. | |
| Yeah, it's only Republican-appointed judges who are stupid and fall on their sword over principle. | |
| It never happens with Democrat-appointed judges. | |
| They always get the right result for the Democrats. | |
| Yeah, so let's talk about that for a second, a couple of minutes remaining in our segment. | |
| Talk about, I mean, you've dealt a lot on the Supreme Court. | |
| You were kind of the ombudsman that guided Gorsuch through, if I'm not mistaken, through Congress. | |
| Why is it that at times Republicans capitulate to mainstream media wishes? | |
| I'm sorry, maybe it was Kavanaugh. | |
| Maybe I'm misremembering. | |
| But why is that sometimes people on the right or constitutional justices capitulate and people like Katangi Brown Jackson never do? | |
| Well, I've worked on five of the six Republican-appointed justices. | |
| I worked on Roberts and Alito when I worked in the Bush 43 White House. | |
| I clerked for Justice Gorsuch and helped him get through the process. | |
| And I was the Senate staff leader for Justice Kavanaugh. | |
| There you go. | |
| So you're across the board. | |
| Yeah, an Article 3 project I did helped with the Barretts from the outside. | |
| So here's the deal. | |
| There are justices who have stronger backbones than others. | |
| And I think what we need to remember when we appoint these judges is their job is to follow the law. | |
| Their job, they have lifetime appointments. | |
| They have pay protection. | |
| They are insulated from the politics. | |
| They're supposed to have backbones of steel so they can make the tough decisions because they need to keep the political branches in check under our Constitution. | |
| I just, it's just so interesting because on these kind of what should be nine-nothing cases, Democrats just you have this immovable block of Katangi Brown Jackson, of um, so do my or Kagan. | |
| Yes, that's right. | |
| So I suppose 30 seconds remaining. | |
| News last night, you know, the Republican Party was unable to win a very winnable Georgia Senate race, now 5149. | |
| Supreme Court would be merely speculation. | |
| Circuit court is not. | |
| How is Joe Biden doing filling the circuit court bench with radical Marxists? | |
| 30 seconds. | |
| He's doing a great job. | |
| So President Trump, we set the all-time records for the appointments of federal judges. | |
| I worked with my boss chairman Chuck Grassley on the Senate Judiciary Committee along with Mitch McConnell. | |
| That's the one thing where we all work together and set records on the Supreme Court, the lower federal courts, we transformed it. | |
| President Biden has a very good chance of transforming the federal appellate courts back. | |
| And if we lose any Supreme Court justices over the next two years, we could see a sea change in federal law. | |
| But hey, 700,000 people in Georgia had something better to do yesterday. | |
| Remember that. | |
| 700,000 Trump voters, they had something more important than vote for the future of America. | |
| Mike Davis, thank you so much. | |
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Elon Musk and Free Speech Risks
00:14:57
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| Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here. | |
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| You did the tough thing for your employees during COVID. | |
| Let covidtaxrelief.org help get you up to $26,000 per employee. | |
| That is covidtaxrelief.org. | |
| Twitter has retaken its place as a public square, as a fun and exciting company. | |
| But everyone told us that Twitter's going to fall apart if that electric car guy is going to take over. | |
| They'll help us navigate that. | |
| And also the ever-intriguing FTX story is David Sachs, incredibly smart man, very successful. | |
| And I really enjoyed seeing him on Tucker. | |
| I think it was last week. | |
| David, welcome back to the program. | |
| Good to be with you again, Charlie. | |
| Okay, so David, everyone said that Twitter was going to die, and it actually looks as if users are up and it's fun. | |
| It's exciting. | |
| What is your take kind of just on Elon's courage to take over Twitter? | |
| And at least in the immediate, it seems as if success and momentum. | |
| Yeah, well, you remember that the week before Thanksgiving, you saw all these media pundits and commentators. | |
| They were all tearfully saying their goodbyes on Twitter. | |
| They were predicting the site's imminent demise. | |
| Apparently, the servers would basically melt down because of neglect. | |
| All this was triggered because Elon first did a riff at the company, and then he offered the remaining employees a voluntary three-month severance, 50% more than he had to, a generous severance, if they didn't want us to return to the office and work hard. | |
| And simply for doing that, again, there was this total meltdown and hysteria and predictions that Twitter would imminently go down. | |
| And we're now a few weeks later and the site's running just fine. | |
| In fact, it seems to be running better and it's faster. | |
| It's more interesting. | |
| And so none of these predictions have amounted to much. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And so, I mean, Elon hasn't structurally changed a lot yet. | |
| But what he has done is liberated the platform, which of course makes the mainstream media and kind of the censorship bureau extremely upset. | |
| But just from a purely, and this is just somewhat subjective, I just think the platform is a lot more fun right now. | |
| And because the internet has just become an overly censored, very serious place. | |
| You can't make it, it's just now Twitter is now a place for legitimate content distribution. | |
| And Elon, I want to get your insight into this why he's doing this. | |
| I think he's doing it because it's the right thing, but it also isn't making him any friends or favors with the American ruling class. | |
| Why is he leaking all these Twitter file documents? | |
| I mean, Elon very well could have just pressed control, alt, delete and got rid of them. | |
| He's going right up against the most entrenched power sources in our country. | |
| What is your calculation here? | |
| What do you think his calculations? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, this is all a downside for him. | |
| He's being threatened by some of the most powerful people in the country. | |
| And they're not just threatening Twitter, but they're threatening his other companies. | |
| So he's put himself at tremendous risk to do this. | |
| And I think the reason is very simple. | |
| It's what he said. | |
| He wants Twitter to be transparent. | |
| He wants to restore free speech to Twitter. | |
| And I think fundamentally he just believes in fair play. | |
| He just thinks that the rules need to apply to everyone equally. | |
| And I think that on a very basic level of values, he was offended by the idea that Twitter's former management would suppress a perfectly true story by a reasonably respected publication, the New York Post, in cahoots with operatives from one political party and the security state. | |
| So I think that he feels like bringing transparency to what went wrong is part of the reset here. | |
| But ultimately, I think this is just about his belief in free speech, transparency, and fair play, because there's nothing in it for him except restoring those values to social media. | |
| Ironically, I don't get the appearance that he's purely focused on making this a very profitable company. | |
| But ironically, I actually think it's going to become one because he's so mission-driven, because there really isn't a place where free speech and heterodox ideas are able to exist online, where all the kind of quote-unquote cool kids are able to discuss and have online conversation. | |
| I mean, I don't want to get too speculative here, but I mean, Elon has either joked or been very serious. | |
| You're never more serious than when you're joking, that he's worried that he's going to get suicided. | |
| I mean, he's said that a couple of times that he's not suicidal and that he needs to increase his security. | |
| Let's just put that aside. | |
| But what he's really getting at is, and this should just be alarming for any onlooker, is you have to worry about your personal safety because you want people to speak freely. | |
| He's offending a lot of powerful people right now by exposing what happened. | |
| Remember, we had the Son or Biden story came out the month before the election in 2020, and a lot of powerful people told us that that story was Russian disinformation and hacking. | |
| And as it turns out, it was a perfectly accurate story. | |
| And yet, Twitter and other big tech platforms in cahoots, and at the behest of the Democratic Party, as well as these sort of current and former deep state operatives, they suppressed that story. | |
| I mean, you literally could not post a link to that New York Post story. | |
| So, not only did the New York Post get shut out of their account, I remember the Trump campaign spokeswoman Kaylee McInerney, she got shut out of her account for just talking about it. | |
| And then, if you were just an average Twitter user, it literally would not post your tweet if you tried to link to that New York Post story. | |
| So, this was a comprehensive attempt at suppression the month before the election. | |
| Again, at the behest of Biden's campaign. | |
| I mean, I don't know how you justify that. | |
| I don't know what the possible justification for that could be. | |
| I mean, that is election interference, isn't it? | |
| The justification is these people are so evil. | |
| This is how we would, this is how we, this is what we do to the Third Reich. | |
| That's that's what that is what they say to themselves internally on their Slack channels. | |
| They're Nazis. | |
| We must do whatever we possibly can. | |
| And right. | |
| So, in order to protect democracy, in their view, they have to engage in the very kind of election interference that they accuse the Russians of. | |
| Yes. | |
| But it wasn't the Russians, it was them. | |
| They become the beasts that they're telling us they're trying to prevent. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So, in any event, I think, you know, look, Elon was joking around in a Twitter space. | |
| I don't think that, you know, I don't think that he's worried about his safety that way, but it was sort of a joke. | |
| But there's no question that he is threatening to expose powerful people. | |
| And you look at the media reaction to this. | |
| The media, you know, always prides itself and congratulates itself on bringing transparency and supposedly exposing the lies of powerful people. | |
| But in this case, the lies that are being exposed are their own. | |
| I mean, it was their own participation in this cover-up. | |
| You know, they basically ran with this idea, this phony idea that the story was Russian disinformation. | |
| It wasn't. | |
| And so, you know, all of a sudden now they want to pretend like this isn't a story. | |
| They're saying things like, well, this is really about, you know, Hunter Biden's dick pics. | |
| It's not. | |
| That's not what this is about. | |
| Or they're saying this is old news. | |
| Well, how can it be old news if you never acknowledge the story in the first place? | |
| It's only old news for those of us who actually understood the story to be true two years ago. | |
| But the people who suppressed it never acknowledged its truth. | |
| So how can they now say that, oh, well, we knew this all along? | |
| Well, really? | |
| Where's your acknowledgement of the story? | |
| And they're still not acknowledging it. | |
| That's really well put. | |
| And it's such gaslighting. | |
| Like, oh, this is old news. | |
| You guys never reported it as news in the first place. | |
| No, you call this conspiracy theorists. | |
| And so now it's like an old conspiracy theory? | |
| Exactly. | |
| It doesn't make sense. | |
| So I want to get your take also. | |
| I do want to talk about FTX, but I have one final question here just on the Elon thing, which is, you know, somebody asked me the other day, they said, Charlie, what does a courageous person look like? | |
| I said, Elon Musk looks like a courageous person. | |
| I mean, it's just he is putting so many business contracts, government contracts seemingly at risk to allow, you know, some sort of liberation of conversation. | |
| Do you get that as well? | |
| I mean, do you view this as, you know, kind of a modern day technological courageous crusade? | |
| I don't think there's any other way to look at it. | |
| Yes, I think it's brave, and that's why he must be supported. | |
| Yes. | |
| You know, like I said, there's nothing in it for him. | |
| I mean, all he's doing is not only putting himself and Twitter at risk with a lot of powerful people, he's also putting his other companies at risk. | |
| You're already seeing threats made by various senators that Tesla needs to be investigated or SpaceX based on what he's doing at Twitter. | |
| It's quite extraordinary. | |
| So, I think that when somebody steps up like this, and again, he's not doing this because he's a conservative. | |
| He's not a conservative. | |
| I mean, Charlie, if you made a list of issues that, you know, that you would like check the box on in order to be what you would consider a conservative, I don't think Elon would qualify on the vast majority of them. | |
| You know, this is not being motivated by a partisan bias or an ideological bias. | |
| He just believes in free speech and he believes in fair play and transparency. | |
| And I think that the way that this platform was previously run for the benefit of one side in the debate and one political party was offensive to those ideals. | |
| And I think he's resetting it. | |
| And I think it's a great thing for democracy. | |
| I think it'll ultimately be a good thing for Twitter. | |
| By the way, I mean, in terms of making Twitter a better, more profitable company, he's going to bring back a lot of product innovation. | |
| So this isn't only about speech policy. | |
| It's also about restoring innovation to the company because the company has been incredibly, you know, uninnovative for years. | |
| And I think he's going to fix that problem. | |
| And that's what's going to make it a much better business. | |
| And he's already talked about a lot of the new features he's going to bring. | |
| So it's not only about speech that's going to make Twitter, I think, a more interesting, dynamic platform. | |
| But back to the point about speech, this really is just about core American values. | |
| I mean, the First Amendment is first for a reason. | |
| Our freedom of speech is enshrined in that. | |
| But the power structure found a loophole to the First Amendment. | |
| That loophole is that private actors are, they're free to limit people's speech. | |
| And unfortunately, the town square got privatized. | |
| It's really the town square is now in the hands of a handful of big tech companies. | |
| That is where speech occurs, is on these giant social networks that, and they're run by, you know, a small number of sort of executives. | |
| And so if those executives get together and decide to cancel people or deplatforming, deplatform them, they can really take away their free speech rights. | |
| So this is really about whether we in the United States are going to have an effective First Amendment anymore. | |
| And I think that Elon is really pushing back on this idea that Twitter executives, or really, I think he's setting an example for executives of all these big tech companies, whether they are simply going to indulge in their own political and partisan biases and suppress the side of the debate that they personally don't agree with, or whether they're going to set the example of being neutral and staying out of these debates themselves and simply providing the forum for them to take place. | |
| And I think that, you know, this is ultimately the battle that Elon's taken on. | |
| David is an amazingly smart and successful tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist, understands this intimately, as you could tell. | |
| All right, David, I am by no means a crypto expert, but am I really supposed to believe that Sam Bankman-Fried didn't commit any crimes here? | |
| What's your take? | |
| No, I mean, something like $8 billion of customer deposits have just mysteriously disappeared and no one knows where they've gone. | |
| So anytime you have that much money disappearing overnight, I think it's safe to assume there's some sort of criminal activity going on. | |
| But in this case, the way we actually know quite a bit about the fraud already. | |
| So Sam Bankman-Fried or SBF, as he's known, was the founder of a crypto exchange called FTX. | |
| At the same time, he ran a hedge fund called Alameda, which was his money and he controlled it. | |
| And essentially, he was siphoning off customer deposits from FTX to his hedge fund, Alameda, for his personal use, whether it was for making investments or whether it was making donations to political candidates or dark money or philanthropies that he believed in. | |
| There was this massive siphoning off of customer funds to his own entity, again, for his personal use. | |
| And I think it's a pretty huge financial fraud that we're still in the early stages of unraveling. | |
| So, some of the kind of billionaire finance intelligentsia have come out, if I'm not mistaken, Ackman, I think Paul Tudor-Jones, I could be wrong. | |
| I was reading some of this. | |
| We'll get some of the names here in the chat. | |
| Have come out and they say they believe him and that he really hasn't done anything wrong. | |
| And it seems like the PR tour to win over those kinds of people that are the thought leaders that are managing tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars is working. | |
| How would you compare this to Madoff? | |
|
Regulators Who Courted the Fraud
00:03:49
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| Well, it's interesting. | |
| I think it's Madoff-like in this sense that apparently FTX or Alameda lost $3 billion last year, and the crypto crash didn't even start until this year. | |
| So they were already in the hole by a significant amount of money during the bull market. | |
| And that tells me that something was really wrong there. | |
| And yeah. | |
| And so the Madoff aspect here was that if customers ever withdrew more money from the site, then they had new deposits coming in, they would not be able to pay off those customer deposits. | |
| So, and so, in a sense, this was all just a matter of time in terms of it unraveling. | |
| Because, again, as soon as they would get some sort of event happening, let's say a crypto crash, which is what happened, and you had more customer withdrawals than new net new deposits, the whole thing was going to unravel. | |
| So, it was a, it was Ponzi-like in that respect. | |
| But, but, you know, the difference between this and Madoff, the differences are really curious as well, which is that Madoff was a pretty low-key guy. | |
| Like, nobody knew who he was until he was exposed as running this giant Ponzi scheme. | |
| I mean, to be certain, he seemed to live a pretty good life, but he wasn't putting himself on the cover of magazines. | |
| Whereas SBF really put himself forward as the sort of the white knight of the crypto industry, the sort of benevolent crypto king. | |
| He cultivated media relationships, he courted a lot of press, and he courted a lot of regulators. | |
| You know, he was taking photographs with people like Maxine Waters, who runs the House Finance Committee. | |
| He was supposedly, he was reportedly in the back rooms of the SEC helping to write their crypto regulations. | |
| So, you know, the regulators not only missed this and failed to exercise oversight over this growing fraud that he was perpetrating, but they actually let the fox in the hen house and they were crafting legislation with him and rules with him. | |
| So it's quite extraordinary. | |
| And that's what I think has really caught not just the crypto world, but sort of the larger finance world and the larger venture community really off guard about this. | |
| Is that, again, SBF really created this image of being this extremely benevolent person. | |
| You know, he was always touting this effective altruism that he supposedly believed in. | |
| You know, this idea that he was going to make many billions of dollars, but he was also going to give it all away. | |
| And so therefore, we should trust him. | |
| And so there were many participants, unwitting participants, I think, in the scam. | |
| It was the media. | |
| It was these effective altruism philanthropies. | |
| It was regulators and politicians. | |
| And they all helped create this aura around SBF. | |
| And that aura helped him perpetuate this fraud. | |
| Yes. | |
| And so I think that's the aspect of it that's a little different than Madoff's. | |
| Thing is so synthetic of a caricature, like the messy hair never wearing a suit, kind of just the aloof thing, it's just the whole thing is just the Kermit, the Kermit, the Frog voice. | |
| You know yeah no, just to add another layer to this, the. | |
| I think one of the things that's really interesting about it is the way that Sblf self-diagnosed this and he said, you know in one of these interviews that he did, he said this is the, the woke game that we, we dumb Westerners, play. | |
| Well, said. | |
| Thanks so much for listening. | |
| Everybody email me directly, freedom at Charliekirk.com. | |
| Thanks so much for listening and god bless For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. | |
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