The Charlie Kirk Show - The New York Times's Plan To Ban Us With Darren Beattie
Aired: 2023-02-09
Duration: 32:12


=== NY Times Censorship Playbook (14:44) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey everybody, it's the Charlie Kirk Show.
[00:00:01]  The New York Times is singling out our podcast for censorship and more.
[00:00:06]  Email us your thoughts, freedom, at charliekirk.com.
[00:00:09]  We also have Darren Beattie who joins the program.
[00:00:14]  Very important.
[00:00:15]  Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:00:19]  That is freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:00:21]  And subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show podcast by opening up your podcast app and typing in Charlie Kirk Show.
[00:00:28]  Buckle up, everybody.
[00:00:29]  Here we go.
[00:00:30]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:00:32]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
[00:00:34]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:00:38]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:00:41]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:00:42]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:00:43]  His spirit, his love of this country.
[00:00:45]  He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
[00:00:50]  Turning point USA.
[00:00:51]  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.
[00:01:00]  That's why we are here.
[00:01:03]  Brought to you by the Loan Experts I Trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at AndrewandTodd.com.
[00:01:12]  I'm going to connect what I saw last evening at Arizona State University to a new piece in the New York Times, and that is this theme of censorship.
[00:01:22]  Left-wing governments, movements, communities, politicians, they need censorship.
[00:01:32]  They need to be able to silence dissent.
[00:01:36]  Dissent is a threat to a totalitarian regime.
[00:01:41]  You see, we as conservatives don't view different ideas as a threat.
[00:01:46]  We might view them as annoying.
[00:01:48]  We might view them as silly.
[00:01:50]  We might view them as a waste of time.
[00:01:55]  We don't necessarily view them as a threat to our worldview.
[00:01:59]  Now, mind you, there are certain liberal ideas that shouldn't be taught in schools, critical race theory being one of them, post-modernism, post-structuralism.
[00:02:07]  But outside of schools and when it gets into the kind of public domain, conservatives, for good reason, don't spend a lot of time writing articles calling left-wing sites or news outlets misinformation spreaders.
[00:02:21]  There is a changing landscape of media happening right now.
[00:02:28]  Media is changing in front of our very eyes.
[00:02:29]  It's very interesting.
[00:02:30]  The first one is the New York Times on their business page today has a whole thing on artificial intelligence.
[00:02:37]  They're only a week behind the Charlie Kirk show.
[00:02:41]  That's okay.
[00:02:42]  Where they say the people on screen are fake.
[00:02:44]  It's very interesting, and it's true that you can now develop completely synthetic broadcasts that will say whatever you want it to say and will look neatly tailored.
[00:02:56]  Of which I think to myself, how is that any different than MSNBC?
[00:03:01]  How is the artificial intelligent news reader any different than what you see already on cable television?
[00:03:10]  It's no different.
[00:03:11]  So they say the disinformation is real, the New York Times writes.
[00:03:16]  In another video, a female news anchor heralded China's role in geopolitical relations at an international summit meeting.
[00:03:22]  The computer-generated avatars were supposedly anchors for an outlet called Wolf News.
[00:03:27]  You mean Wolf Blitzer's show?
[00:03:31]  I'm only kidding, but the New York Times is really worried that there might be computer-generated artificial intelligent images that will just do what they're told because someone puts it on screen.
[00:03:46]  That's already been happening for quite some time.
[00:03:49]  However, what they're trying to warn against is that look at all this potential disinformation that can permeate our society.
[00:03:58]  And that connects with this story here in the New York Times, where it talks about how podcasting is growing.
[00:04:04]  Media is changing in some ways for the better and in some ways for the worse in front of our eyes.
[00:04:14]  It says Steve Bannon's podcast is Top Misinformation Spreader study says, and it has a chart.
[00:04:19]  Now, the chart that they use here, this is a very sloppily put together article, largely because the story that they have here, but the story that they have is based on a study that was done by the Brookings Institution quite some time ago.
[00:04:35]  And it has a chart of who are the greatest faults.
[00:04:38]  They say share of episode that contain false, misleading, or unsubstantiated statements.
[00:04:43]  War Room with Steve Bannon, number one, and the Charlie Kirk show is number two.
[00:04:49]  16.6% of the time, the New York Times says, in conjunction with the Brookings Institution, we are spreading false, misleading, or unsubstantiated statements, of which I say name one example, the Brookings Institute.
[00:05:04]  Is it Brookings Institution or the Brookings Institute?
[00:05:06]  No, it's the Brookings Institution.
[00:05:07]  It's not the Brookings Institute.
[00:05:09]  The Brookings Institution published this, published this.
[00:05:12]  And look, Brookings gets a lot of questionable funding.
[00:05:16]  They receive a fair amount of support from shady sources.
[00:05:22]  Brookings is the most uniparty think tank imaginable.
[00:05:26]  And now there is a new division of Brookings where all they do is they listen to our podcast and they label it disinformation and misinformation.
[00:05:35]  We're number two on that list.
[00:05:37]  Now, of course, that comes with a sense of enjoyment and a sense of accomplishment that what they would say is false, misleading, and unsubstantiated.
[00:05:46]  Why would I enjoy that or consider accomplishing?
[00:05:48]  Because I know it's not true.
[00:05:50]  I know what they're telling me, what they're saying about our program is not true.
[00:05:53]  We go through rigorous study.
[00:05:55]  We have contrarian guests.
[00:05:56]  We ask different questions.
[00:05:58]  We dive into contrarian narratives.
[00:06:02]  We are not spreading false, misleading, or unsubstantiated statements.
[00:06:05]  We are simply asking questions and trying to get closer to the truth.
[00:06:09]  That's what news and journalism is all about.
[00:06:12]  But why is the New York Times doing this now?
[00:06:15]  The answer is threefold.
[00:06:20]  Number one, the new Pfizer story that Project Veritas put out, thanks to the wonderful work of James O'Keefe recently, shows the pharmaceutical industry is doing everything they can to try to stop any communication platforms that might be able to publicize a challenge to the pharmaceutical regime running our country.
[00:06:43]  That's number one.
[00:06:44]  They need to start to get shows like ours, shows like Steve Bannon's, shows like the great one, Mark Levin, who's on the list.
[00:06:54]  They have to silence us.
[00:06:56]  They have to shut us up.
[00:06:58]  That's number one.
[00:06:59]  Number two is if you look at this list, they're all conservative, except Brett Weinstein, the Dark Horse podcast, who I actually listened to his podcast as an original kind of inspiration to have the courage to speak out on the vaccine.
[00:07:16]  Not that I didn't have the courage, I just was uncertain about it.
[00:07:18]  And he confirmed so much of my kind of instincts that there was something not right here.
[00:07:22]  Maybe we should just ask questions.
[00:07:24]  Brett Weinstein deserves great credit for that.
[00:07:28]  But the second reason is that War Room, Charlie Kirk Show, Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, Michael Savage, Brett Weinstein, Daniel Horowitz, Lauderworth Crowder, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Rudy Giuliani that they list.
[00:07:39]  You combine those shows together.
[00:07:43]  It is a greater reach, a greater impact, a deeper ability to shape narratives than CNN, MSNBC, and they know it.
[00:07:54]  Media has changed so substantially that people are now going to ulier methods of distribution and media to be able to find out what's happening in the world.
[00:08:08]  And the New York Times finds that to be very troubling.
[00:08:10]  And so they label us as misinformation, which of course is not true.
[00:08:15]  You see here on the list, War Room number one, Charlie Kirk show number two, a close second.
[00:08:19]  I'll take the silver medal behind Steve Bannon.
[00:08:22]  But look, this is the third thing.
[00:08:23]  This is what they do.
[00:08:24]  It's exactly, and this is why I spoke out so forcefully back in May and before that about the censorship and the campaign against Alex Jones.
[00:08:37]  This is the same playbook they used against InfoWars and Alex Jones.
[00:08:40]  I'm not saying you have to like Alex Jones and think he's great or all that, and some people say he's terrible.
[00:08:45]  That's irrelevant to my point.
[00:08:47]  What is relevant is the same playbook, the same blueprint that they used against Alex Jones, the New York Times is now trying to use against our program, which is exactly why I felt compelled to say, we're not going to allow this to happen again.
[00:09:02]  This show is a direct threat to them.
[00:09:05]  And by the way, anyone from the Brookings Institution is welcome on this program anytime, and we can discuss, you can have the floor uninterrupted, why you think I am a spreader of misinformation, false or misleading, unsubstantiated statements.
[00:09:20]  No, the New York Times is platforming this because they want us silenced.
[00:09:26]  The same way that Twitter silenced me.
[00:09:28]  And we'll get into that.
[00:09:31]  Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
[00:09:33]  When Roe versus Wade fell as the law of the land last year, all it did was increase what pro-abortion states are doing to entice and mislead women to abort their children.
[00:09:42]  States are now advertising to travel just to get an abortion.
[00:09:46]  It's become abortion trafficking.
[00:09:48]  So the need to provide the truth as girls and women are contemplating what to do about their pregnancy is greater now than ever before.
[00:09:55]  Ultrasounds save babies because ultrasounds give the truth at a time everyone else is saying it's not just a baby, it's just a clump of cells.
[00:10:03]  When you introduce a girl to her baby by providing an ultrasound, you are giving her the truth at the most important time of her life.
[00:10:10]  And more than 85% of the time, she will choose life.
[00:10:13]  You don't have to make a lot of noise to make a big difference for life.
[00:10:16]  Just give an ultrasound at preborn.org to be a hero for life.
[00:10:19]  That is preborn.org.
[00:10:20]  $140 gives five mothers a free ultrasound and saves babies.
[00:10:24]  $200 can save 10 babies.
[00:10:26]  Go to preborn.org.
[00:10:27]  I love this organization.
[00:10:28]  I'm a donor to it.
[00:10:29]  Check it out: preborn.org.
[00:10:33]  Television, radio, YouTube, they all used to be somewhat free, but they've gradually become more and more centralized and controlled.
[00:10:41]  Podcasts have the lowest cost of entry of any form of media.
[00:10:46]  They're truly small D democratic.
[00:10:48]  You buy a microphone and you just talk.
[00:10:51]  And if you have a good idea or you have interesting guests or you're an expert in something, you can grow very quickly.
[00:10:57]  You can make a ton of money like Joe Rogan has.
[00:11:00]  I mean, Joe Rogan is probably one of the highest paid media people.
[00:11:03]  God bless him.
[00:11:04]  He deserves it.
[00:11:05]  And he had tons of courage on the COVID issue, especially.
[00:11:08]  And it just kind of started with Joe Rogan with buddies and friends.
[00:11:11]  If you go look at the old Joe Rogan experience videos or podcasts, it was just kind of Joe Rogan chilling with friends back in 2011, 2012, and uploading the audio file.
[00:11:19]  I was like, I don't know if anyone's going to listen to this.
[00:11:21]  And then it slowly became kind of the center of the contrarian zeitgeist.
[00:11:27]  That sounds interesting.
[00:11:28]  The center of the contrarian zeitgeist.
[00:11:30]  What I'm trying to say is that if you have a different idea, that is not, it's heterodox.
[00:11:34]  Heterodox ideas live here, is what the subheader of the Joe Rogan experience should be.
[00:11:39]  150 years ago, we had hundreds and hundreds of small newspapers and journals that catered to every audience.
[00:11:47]  Today, those journals and papers are largely gone.
[00:11:51]  Podcasts are the replacement.
[00:11:53]  You see, what is such a threat to the regime, and one of the reasons why podcasting is so successful is that it doesn't require a ton of capital to continue to produce or to be able to distribute.
[00:12:12]  And you look at the New York Times list right here of what they consider to misinformation spreaders.
[00:12:18]  You'll see it's all conservatives.
[00:12:20]  Now, it just gets a little bit more concerning than this because some of you are emailing us, oh, come on, Charlie, what's the big deal here?
[00:12:24]  We know this.
[00:12:25]  No, this is the big push, though.
[00:12:27]  They are now going to pressure Apple and Google, the podcast distributors, to censor our program.
[00:12:37]  That's the significance here.
[00:12:39]  They kicked Alex Jones off of Apple.
[00:12:41]  And so now with articles like this, the drumbeat, if you dare question mainstream narratives, you should no longer be able to have a podcast on Apple.
[00:12:51]  The quote at the top of the Brookings study is this, quote, since the advent of the medium, podcasts have generally offered a space where you can say whatever you want.
[00:13:00]  Once written off as a dying medium, podcasting has undergone rapid growth and monetization while largely avoiding content moderation and regulatory debates.
[00:13:10]  And that is true in one sense.
[00:13:13]  Podcasting, you can do whatever you want.
[00:13:15]  No rules, not regulated.
[00:13:17]  Now, similarly, the New York Times article includes this line, quote, the findings underscore the vital role that Apple and Google and a constellation of podcast applications play in connecting disinformation peddlers to their audiences.
[00:13:33]  Now, read between the lines here.
[00:13:36]  The agenda of this article is not to inform readers.
[00:13:40]  The reason they wrote this and the reason that I am in the New York Times today, it's to put pressure on Apple and Google and other companies to deplatform programs that the elite left consider misinformation.
[00:13:55]  And you could add Spotify to that list as well, which of course is any show that disagrees with them.
[00:14:01]  So what do they, how do they decide this?
[00:14:04]  Well, it is a Brookings institution that has very strong opinions of their own.
[00:14:08]  So they're not exactly an impartial referee.
[00:14:11]  They're not exactly, let's say, neutral.
[00:14:15]  But it's a couple topics that we have decided to ask questions about over the last couple of years.
[00:14:21]  Number one, the vaccine.
[00:14:23]  We made a decision to ask questions about the vaccine.
[00:14:27]  We made a decision to ask questions about BLM, burn, loot, murder, or BLM, Black Lives Matter, whichever one you want to use the acronym for in 2020.
[00:14:41]  Or buy large mansions, BLM.

=== Deciding Tough Topics Like Vaccines (02:37) ===

[00:14:44]  You could fill it in however you want.
[00:14:45]  We decided to ask questions about the integrity of our elections.
[00:14:50]  We made a decision to do that.
[00:14:51]  We knew that we were going to get pressure for doing that.
[00:14:55]  We made a decision to ask questions about bio labs in Ukraine.
[00:15:00]  We made a decision to ask questions about ivermectin hydroxychloroquine, intravenous therapy, baby aspirin, vitamin D supplementation, and early treatments.
[00:15:11]  We made a decision to ask questions about big tech manipulating our elections.
[00:15:18]  And by the way, almost every one of those decisions we made, over time, we were vindicated.
[00:15:25]  And they were the misinformation spreaders, not us.
[00:15:30]  I want to tell you guys about COVID tax relief.
[00:15:33]  COVID tax relief is an amazing service that exists for you because of Washington, D.C.'s addiction to overspending.
[00:15:41]  Again, I'm not a fan that this money exists or that's out there or that it's available, but as they say, it is what it is.
[00:15:47]  Look, COVIDTaxRelief.org got a small retail business, almost $80,000.
[00:15:52]  COVIDtaxRelief.org got a manufacturing business, nearly $250,000.
[00:15:57]  COVIDTaxRelief.org got a large distribution business, almost $900,000.
[00:16:01]  If you run a business, church or nonprofit, and paid your employees through all or part of the pandemic, you could qualify for up to $26,000 per employee through the Government Cares Act.
[00:16:11]  COVIDtaxRelief.org receives a low commission, very reasonable, only after you receive the money.
[00:16:15]  So go to covidtaxrelief.org.
[00:16:17]  That is covidtaxrelief.org, covidtaxrelief.org.
[00:16:21]  Check it out right now, covidtaxrelief.org.
[00:16:27]  I do want to thank you, the audience.
[00:16:31]  You are the reason we keep on doing what we are doing.
[00:16:35]  You are the reason why we take on the tough topics.
[00:16:39]  And your emails today have been fabulous and supportive, saying, Charlie, keep fighting, don't back down, keep on talking about the tough stuff.
[00:16:48]  And so that really, that really touches us and me personally.
[00:16:53]  The connection that we have to you, the audience, is very special.
[00:16:58]  You guys can always go to charliekirk.com.
[00:17:01]  There is a support tab there.
[00:17:03]  If you guys ever want to get behind the work we are doing, it's charliekirk.com/slash support.
[00:17:10]  And you, the audience, you are the jet fuel that allows us to continue to climb.
[00:17:16]  Okay, Darren, welcome back to the program.
[00:17:19]  Great to be here as always.

=== The Russia Pipeline Meme Case (14:51) ===

[00:17:21]  So, Darren, I want to talk to you about the meme case.
[00:17:24]  I want you to lay it out.
[00:17:25]  You have a wonderful piece on Revolver.news.
[00:17:27]  And then I want to make our announcement, our modest contribution to the cause that hopefully will inspire our audience to do something.
[00:17:35]  So state the case, Darren, and then we'll make our announcement.
[00:17:38]  Well, I mean, it really is one of the most disturbing and certainly the most important First Amendment case that unfortunately a lot of Americans haven't even heard of yet.
[00:17:50]  And it involves the case of a young man called Douglas Mackey, who is allegedly behind a now kind of legendary Twitter account in the 2016 sort of Trump campaign era.
[00:18:07]  And this humbly young man just operating this pseudonymous account that trafficked in memes and a lot of the memes were really funny.
[00:18:16]  Some were controversial.
[00:18:17]  Some were both controversial and hilarious.
[00:18:22]  MIT conducted a study of the most influential media accounts on the 2016 election.
[00:18:29]  And to their shock and consternation, this pseudonymous Twitter account operated by some young man in New York, allegedly, was more influential on the 2016 election than CBS and other just multi-multi-million dollar corporate media outlets.
[00:18:51]  And I think that was kind of a thorn in the side of the regime.
[00:18:56]  And so they decided to go after this guy.
[00:18:59]  And what are they saying?
[00:19:00]  Well, one of the memes in question is following a meme format that's designed to mock the intelligence of Hillary Clinton and her supporters.
[00:19:10]  God forbid, right?
[00:19:12]  And what it says essentially, Hillary supporters, if you want to vote for Hillary, don't even bother, you know, just text Hillary to this number.
[00:19:22]  It's like with the suggestion that Hillary voters are so dumb that they would text Hillary to a number instead of go vote.
[00:19:30]  It was clearly following a satirical format.
[00:19:35]  But shortly after Biden took office, they arrested this guy.
[00:19:39]  Now they're charging him and he faces up to 10 years in prison for this satirical meme mocking Hillary supporters.
[00:19:48]  How on earth can they do this?
[00:19:50]  Well, they're dredging up some ancient statute that was originally designed to combat the Ku Klux Klan and prevent the Klan from like physically intimidating African-American voters from going to the polls.
[00:20:10]  And they're saying that the statute that was designed to prevent the Ku Klux Klan from like blocking a street to prevent an African-American from going to vote encompasses a prohibition, a criminal prohibition on satirical Twitter memes saying, oh, you want to go vote this, vote this thing.
[00:20:34]  And the thing is, the government hasn't even been able to produce a single aggrieved party.
[00:20:40]  That is to say, a single individual who did not go vote because they were discussing.
[00:20:46]  That's the whole crisis.
[00:20:47]  Then you have no victims.
[00:20:49]  And so let me just kind of share a part of this, why I'm so passionate about it.
[00:20:54]  So I got my start working in politics as a volunteer in the suburbs of Chicago.
[00:20:59]  And the 2010 election was the first election.
[00:21:01]  I knocked on a bunch of doors.
[00:21:02]  And I'll never forget there was a get out the vote rally for then Congressman Mark Kirk, no relation, ended up being a very moderate senator.
[00:21:10]  But I'm glad he won.
[00:21:11]  He beat Dan Seals.
[00:21:14]  And there was this get out the vote rally.
[00:21:17]  And someone got up on stage the Saturday before the election.
[00:21:21]  And they said, I want all of you to go vote on Tuesday.
[00:21:24]  And for all you Democrats, make sure you go vote Wednesday.
[00:21:29]  Exactly.
[00:21:29]  Now, why am I saying that?
[00:21:31]  That is kind of a typical one-liner in goofy boomer politics, right?
[00:21:36]  Let's just be honest.
[00:21:37]  Like, oh, yeah, I want my opposition to go vote on a different day.
[00:21:40]  And everyone would laugh and chuckle.
[00:21:42]  Darren, what you're saying is that is now criminal speech according to the Biden administration.
[00:21:48]  But it goes beyond that.
[00:21:49]  It's criminal speech.
[00:21:50]  And they're trying to put this young guy in jail for 10 years.
[00:21:53]  And I think we all know, like, if it wasn't actually about mocking Hillary and if MIT didn't determine that this guy had more of an influence on the election than, you know, CBS and the other sort of corporate controlled Hillary aligned media, this, you know, prosecution would never happen.
[00:22:14]  But it's actually even bigger than that because, of course, they're saying that this is disinformation.
[00:22:21]  And so what it's really about, and this is why it's so dangerous, what it's really about is an attempt by the Biden regime to codify the entire disinformation scam into the criminal code.
[00:22:35]  So that disinformation, which as we discussed in many occasions on this show and elsewhere, disinformation is the regime's new censorship predicate.
[00:22:46]  And what they're doing is they're saying if you engage in disinformation, that is speech we don't like, you're not only going to be deplatformed from all social media platforms, you're not only going to be fired from your job, you're going to be put in jail, which, as I've said, is kind of the ultimate deplatforming.
[00:23:03]  That's right.
[00:23:04]  So that's what's really at stake here.
[00:23:06]  New York Times today has our show as the number two spreader of disinformation, Darren.
[00:23:11]  So you're exactly right.
[00:23:12]  Oh, you better watch out.
[00:23:13]  You might face 10 years, Charlie.
[00:23:16]  That is unfortunately not hyperbole.
[00:23:18]  So what we're going to do at Turning Point USA, just to motivate our audience, this is a young man.
[00:23:22]  His name is Douglas Mackey.
[00:23:24]  He made memes.
[00:23:24]  He made jokes in the 2016 election.
[00:23:27]  Okay.
[00:23:29]  And because of this, the Biden administration is trying to break him financially, put him in jail as a Soviet show trial because he made graphics and memes that there is not a singular provable victim, but they want to try to set a legal precedent that if you make fun of a Democrat presidential candidate, it could land you in jail.
[00:23:49]  They're trying to stunt creativity.
[00:23:51]  They're trying to stop the entire subterranean internet culture that was one of the life forces behind Donald Trump's successful 2016 campaign of just kind of meme internet culture where people would make fun of Hillary and they'd make fun of WikiLeaks.
[00:24:05]  They make fun of all this.
[00:24:06]  They want to stunt all of it.
[00:24:07]  So what we're doing at Turning Point USA, we're going to match up to just a little bit, $10,000 of his legal fund.
[00:24:15]  It's meme defensefund.com.
[00:24:17]  So this is to help him with legal fees.
[00:24:20]  So our audience, and Darren, you could put on your website, if we can raise $10,000, Turning Point USA will match it, which will give a $20,000 net total contribution to his legal fund.
[00:24:31]  Darren, why is it important that we get behind this?
[00:24:35]  Well, it's important for a lot of reasons.
[00:24:36]  It's important because a young guy is facing 10 years in prison for something ridiculous, for satirical memes against Hillary.
[00:24:43]  But it's important for the country because, again, it's bad enough that the regime's trying to censor any kind of opposition under the manifest pretext of disinformation.
[00:24:56]  But to take it a step further and make it a criminal offense puts us so close to this dystopian China-like situation that we couldn't even call ourselves a free society anymore.
[00:25:09]  That's how dangerous it is.
[00:25:10]  So everyone who cares about the role of free speech in the deliberative democratic process, anyone who cares about just the importance of humor and satire in a kind of free and flourishing society, this case is the most important case.
[00:25:28]  So I really encourage everyone, and I, you know, I congratulate you for stepping up for this because it's truly an issue of national importance.
[00:25:39]  Free speech is a precondition for freedom in every other context.
[00:25:44]  If we don't have free speech, we have nothing.
[00:25:47]  Alexander Solshenitsyn used to speak frequently on how the cartoonists received some of the harshest treatment in the gulags.
[00:25:58]  The people that would satirize Stalin, the people that would write cartoons against the regime.
[00:26:06]  I mean, let's just be honest, what it was.
[00:26:08]  And there's a reason for that because humor can pierce and penetrate in a way that other mediums can't.
[00:26:18]  Humor is memorable, humor is true.
[00:26:22]  And again, totalitarian dictators have a lot in common, including the need to chill speech.
[00:26:28]  But they also, more than even chilling speech, you're not allowed to mock the ruler.
[00:26:37]  This Nord Stream story is, it seems to be limitlessly interesting.
[00:26:44]  There's so many wrinkles to it.
[00:26:46]  How should we think about it?
[00:26:47]  What is the truth?
[00:26:49]  Well, in short, the Nord Stream one and two were critically important pipelines that were constructed that enabled Russia to provide energy to Europe, including and especially Germany.
[00:27:04]  They'd always been a profound thorn in the side of NATO, NATO-aligned countries, and in particular, the United States, in particular, that color revolution faction that I've spoken about that is singularly obsessed with Russia.
[00:27:21]  And sure enough, in the immediate aftermath of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Nord Stream pipelines just kind of blow up.
[00:27:33]  And, you know, nobody knows for sure what exactly happened.
[00:27:39]  I haven't heard anything remotely logical or plausible along the lines of Russia blew up their own pipeline, which kind of was the standard line promoted by people associated with the regime in some capacity.
[00:27:55]  But President Biden and Victoria Newland, who has a long history with Russia, was involved in the color revolution, Euromaidan, basically telegraphed that one way or another, the pipeline is going down, kind of cryptic, almost sort of mafia-style threats.
[00:28:16]  And now there's been an explosive report by this Pulitzer-winning journalist, Seymour Hirsch, purporting to give a very detailed operational account of how, yes, the U.S. did it, and not just a U.S. proxy, which is always a sort of a possibility, but the U.S. did it directly.
[00:28:40]  It was Navy divers operating in the pretext of some kind of harmless exercise.
[00:28:47]  They pretended to do this exercise, but really planted explosives.
[00:28:51]  This was all being conducted and planned before Russia's invasion even happened, and that it was coming from the very top levels of the Biden White House.
[00:29:02]  Now, the truth about this story is Seymour Hirsch has been very accurate.
[00:29:07]  He's wanted Pulitzer.
[00:29:09]  It's an unnamed source, and it looks like it relies on only one source.
[00:29:13]  But the claims and account here is absolutely explosive.
[00:29:17]  It's hard to overemphasize the severity of this because in any normal context, this would amount to an act of war.
[00:29:27]  And interestingly enough, not just an act of war against Russia, which is more obvious, but an act of war against Germany, because Nord Stream 2 is actually a critical piece of Germany's economic infrastructure.
[00:29:42]  And the behavior of Germany and other European countries as like good, obedient, dog-like vassal states, United States, is more conspicuous than ever.
[00:29:53]  Because the most we've seen from Europe and Scandinavian countries is we have seen no evidence that the U.S. claims that this was Russia blowing up their own important pipeline, which is like their most precious piece of infrastructure to Europe that had been in construction for years.
[00:30:10]  The notion that they blew up their pipeline was ridiculous.
[00:30:14]  And the Scandinavian countries are basically between the lines intimating that it was the U.S. or U.S. proxies by saying there's absolutely no evidence.
[00:30:23]  And the broader sort of geopolitical take home from this, I think, is that as much as we want to think of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in terms of Russia, obviously, and the U.S. proxy war with Russia, I think there's a different and equally important story that pertains to our relationship with Europe.
[00:30:43]  Because up until this point, Macron and others were talking about strategic autonomy, reasserting Europe's geopolitical sovereignty.
[00:30:52]  All of that is absolutely thrown out the window.
[00:30:55]  There could be no more spectacular display of complete American dominance and hegemony over the affairs of Europe than us, whether directly or indirectly, sabotaging Germany's pipeline and getting away with it completely.
[00:31:14]  There's one wrinkle here that I seem focused on.
[00:31:17]  If we did indeed do this, which is a cash cow for Russia, and also, obviously, Germany benefits, hasn't Russia shown rather extraordinary restraint by not retaliating?
[00:31:29]  Well, they've already shown extraordinary restraint given all the weapons that we've been providing directly to their enemies.
[00:31:36]  I mean, Russia is in a very unenviable and difficult position geopolitically.
[00:31:42]  Putin's decision to invade the Ukraine has proved disastrous for Russia.
[00:31:46]  And this story about Nordstream is yet another example.
[00:31:50]  Darren Beatty, right of time, revolver.news, check it out.
[00:31:53]  And also support Douglas Mackey at meme defensefund.com.
[00:31:58]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[00:32:00]  Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:32:03]  Thank you so much for listening, and God bless.
[00:32:08]  For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.