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Feb. 16, 2023 - The Charlie Kirk Show
35:24
The World's Longest Pregnant Pause with Steve Cortes and Col. Douglas MacGregor
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Vaccine Suspicions and Media Answers 00:13:58
Hey, everybody.
Today, the Charlie Kirk Show, Colonel Douglas McGregor joins us to talk about what is really going on in Ukraine.
And then we talk about the vaccine with Steve Cortez and one of the more, let's just say, bizarre pregnant pauses in recent memory when it comes to interviews.
I would love your theories.
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Buckle up, everybody.
Here, we go.
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Joining us now is Steve Cortez.
Steve, welcome to the program.
Steve, I caught you on War Room this morning with Bannon, and I wanted to just play this piece of tape here because I thought your take was so smart with DeMar Hamlin.
And in some ways, I'm kind of front and center of this entire story because I tweeted basically as it happened because I was watching it live on Monday Night Football.
People might not remember this was the New Year's Day observed when it happened.
This was right after the Rose Bowl, and it was airing on ABC, which is rare for Monday Night Football.
So that ABC took it as network programming in addition to ESPN.
So there were tons of viewers, and DeMar Hamlin collapsed.
And I tweeted out, I want to make sure the language is correct.
You know, this is a tragic site that is happening far too often.
Athletes dropping suddenly and the world goes nuts.
And Adam Kinzinger calls me human trash and just really got out of control.
And again, I never said the word vaccine and people thought I did.
Okay, but here's, I saw this interview with Michael Strahan, and I really respect Michael Strahan.
And I think he's a really fun person, but he was obviously out of his league here as soon as he was getting into kind of the third rail of politics where he didn't ask the appropriate follow-up question.
But you could see that someone didn't necessarily coach DeMar Hamlin.
I think they just assumed that these answers would be kind of boring and, you know, simple.
But the pregnant pause here, you could take a nap, fly to Europe, and return in the time it took for DeMar Hamlin to answer this question, PlayCut 66.
You're 24, peak physical condition.
Could run circled around me right now.
How did Doctor describe what happened to you?
That's something I want to stay away from.
I want to stay away from that.
Right.
Steve, how should we think about this?
Well, first of all, it's kind of hard to watch that clip, Charlie, isn't it?
I mean, the first time I saw it, it looked so awkward that I figured it was doctored.
So I made sure, and I, by the way, encourage everybody in the audience to do the same.
If something seems almost unbelievable, you know, check it out.
There's so many fakes online.
But the first time I saw it, I said, oh, that's got to be doctored.
Let me look at the original.
I did from GMA from Good Morning America.
No, that is in fact authentic.
Look, I don't know what's going on in his head.
And let me be clear: I'm not in any sense blaming DeMar Hamlin, who underwent a personal tragedy, a medical tragedy that he seems to be rallying from with gusto.
God bless him.
Okay.
We don't know what kind of pressures are upon him, but we as a country and certainly NFL fans have a very significant interest, a material interest, right?
Not just voyeurism, not just sort of morbid curiosity, a real interest in knowing what happened to him.
Because a 25-year-old, supremely fit athlete engaged in a pretty routine tackle by NFL standards.
That's correct.
Goes into massive cardiac arrest before, as you pointed out correctly, Charlie, before a giant national TV audience.
Okay.
And we're not supposed to ask the questions about what caused this.
And Michael Strahan asked the question, didn't get a satisfactory answer.
By the way, again, I don't want to put this on DeMar Hamlin.
The NFL owes us answers.
I think that the media owes us answers.
What to me is appalling is the total lack of media curiosity.
Michael Strahan didn't follow up, but more importantly, no one in the corporate media has followed up.
Why?
Well, I believe it's because they're scared of where the answers might lead.
And that doesn't mean, Charlie, I want to be clear here and careful.
I'm not saying that it was vaccine related, but a lot of people have suspicions that it is.
But wherever the answers and the investigation leads, we need to know why a man, very, very strong man, at the peak of his physical abilities, would go into that kind of cardiac arrest where he would have died in all likelihood had there not been expert medical care, thank God, right there to care for him.
You pinpointed the difficulty right now for the NFL.
So if they actually get pressure on this, which they won't, this is going to get memory hold and this is going to be forgotten.
The NFL, one of their talking points is like, well, you know, this actually happens all the time.
Like, well, it does?
Then NFL's not.
Wait, wait, hold on.
The football's not as safe as you say it is.
So they can't say that.
And so originally they said, well, it's a freak incident.
And that doesn't make any sense for a variety of different reasons.
And they can't say that it was the mRNA shot.
They can't say that.
But Steve, we're starting to see this is becoming too big to cover up, right?
No, wait, we had too big to fail.
This is too big to cover up.
This is caught on a hot mic.
World Series poker player Aaron Dusick caught on a hot mic.
I wish I never got the vaccine.
I've been having chest pains ever since I had that thing.
And remember, Nancy Mace last week said the same thing.
Congressman, memory hold, media didn't cover it.
Play cut 53.
I wish they would have never got the vaccine.
What's that?
I wish I never would have got the vaccine.
I never did.
I've been mad and chest pain ever since I had that thing.
Really?
Yeah.
Still, you're still having it?
Yeah, every time to time.
They're saying that you get hardens arteries.
Yeah.
So I need to go get it checked out.
I mean, but ever since, dude, it's just, that's horrible.
It's been weird.
I held out.
I held out until like a month ago, not even a month ago.
Is that right?
Why did you decide to get it all?
Someone to come play the World Truth?
They didn't have that guy like this right now.
Pardon me?
They didn't have that.
That other guy sounds Canadian.
So I'm imagining.
I think he's saying he couldn't get to wherever they're having the poker game.
Steve, your thoughts.
Yeah.
No, listen.
Here's the, I think all of us know somebody in our lives, right, who will tell a similar tale.
Now, that is anecdotal.
It's not proven yet that it's the vaccine, but there are valid reasons to be incredibly suspicious and incredibly skeptical.
And to this point of media and curiosity, you know what's not anecdotal?
is proven on the macro basis, Charlie, is the stubborn prevalence of excess deaths.
Meaning every single week in America in recent months, there are excess deaths over what would be forecasted.
And you can forecast deaths in America with actuarial precision in normal times.
Even taking aside COVID deaths, though, there are several thousand excess deaths per week.
Now, does that mean it's the vax?
No, it does not.
But it does mean that something incredibly unusual is going on outside of people who are suffering from COVID itself.
But again, in normal times, these are anything but normal, media would be all over the story trying to figure out what is causing people to drop dead at an alarming and consistent and stubborn rate.
What is going on here?
What caused DeMar Hamlin to collapse and nearly die in front of the nation and national television?
The incuriosity, I would argue, arises from a complete conflict of interest because for one thing, corporate media and especially sports media, the last thing they want to do is antagonize the NFL, right?
Which is one of the last live events that people really tune into TV for.
So they certainly don't want to antagonize the NFL.
I would also argue they certainly don't want to antagonize big pharma, one of the biggest advertisers on corporate media, particularly the news shows, if you notice, they're all right Pfizer constantly.
And then also, most of all, just in the macro sense, they don't want to disturb the narrative.
And the narrative is all of these public health mandates and tyrannies that were inflicted upon the country, they were all done because of science and they're good for you.
And we can't question any of that.
You got to wonder why DeMar Hamlin took 10 seconds to answer a very simple question.
Was he stewing on something?
Does he have a personal theory?
Does he have regret?
We'll never know because Michael Strahan didn't ask the obvious question like, dude, what?
Can you kind of like fill me in here?
Or maybe he did and it was edited.
Steve, have you ever, have you lived through an issue similar to this where the evidence is becoming so overwhelming and there is just a repeated media blackout?
Pfizer spent $110 million on television advertisements with the major networks last year, $110 million.
They also donate to candidates.
They get a lot of government money.
People sit on these boards.
But is this story, and I mentioned earlier, do you think it's becoming too big to cover up?
I hope it is, right?
Because it's too important for the American people.
And by the way, to that point about the massive advertising from big pharma, remember that these big pharma companies, they can't sell directly to consumers, right?
So they're not really paying so much to reach the consumer because these are all prescription-based.
What they are paying for is they're currying favor with these gatekeepers, with these news organizations.
I firmly believe that is the point of the massive amount of advertising that they do.
You know, but look, you know, as you alluded to earlier, the NFL is not just big pharma.
The NFL has a problem here too, because either it owes the public, it owes its fans an explanation of what happened to DeMar Hamlin, or if it says, hey, this is just a consequence of playing football.
Well, guess what?
We shouldn't be playing football.
Okay.
If it's that dangerous that a routine tackle can send a supremely fit athlete into a near-death experience, then football is not safe.
Now I think football is fine.
All right.
I'm a massive football fan.
I loathe the NFL, but I love football.
But more importantly, whether you're a sports fan or not, for all of society, this issue is not going away.
And let me give you a piece of news that folks out there may not be aware of.
The CDC just made it official, the committee voted weeks ago, but they just made it official a few days ago that the mRNA treatment, it's not really a vaccine, but what we call the vaccine is now on the official recommended list for children in the United States.
Now, you might say to yourself, oh, well, it's just a recommendation.
Does that impact me?
Yes, it's going to, especially in blue states and in blue jurisdictions, because that list from the CDC is not a recommendation to those governors and to those school districts and to those mayors.
It might as well be a papal bull.
Okay.
It is absolutely going to be the excuse they need to insist to mandate this vaccine for your children.
Believe me, that is coming your way.
Even though children are not statistically vulnerable to the dire effects of this virus, even though even if the vaccine is perfectly safe, it still shouldn't be administered to children.
The CDC, nonetheless, I believe, bowed to the pressure of big pharma and has officially added it to the vaccination schedule for children.
So this issue is hardly going away.
No, it's on the official vaccination schedule.
And praise God, we have a great pediatrician that is not forcing it.
What really I hear from parents all the time, they ask me, Charlie, who's your pediatrician?
All this.
And they say, our pediatrician makes us feel so bad and won't treat our six-month-old if we don't get every single vaccine when they want them on the schedule.
And you could space them out.
You could choose different ones.
But now it's on the official CDC vaccination schedule.
By the way, I want to clarify what I said.
The $118 million, that was just on the NFL.
That was not their cumulative ad budget.
That is just the National Football League ad spend, $118 million that Pfizer spent, $118 million.
They spend $2 billion on marketing.
It's so smart.
So they're basically, they have flawed products that variable might be doing damage to people.
You cannot sue them because they're basically indemnified thanks to Congress that passed a law in the 90s, one of the biggest mistakes Reagan ever made, which protected vaccine companies and manufacturers from being sued, happened in the 1980s.
And then they buy off every single major news outlet and the media conglomerates with highly priced advertisement.
So they have a business interest not to cover them.
Strong Cell Anti-Aging Enzyme Review 00:03:59
Right.
No, and listen, and that is the reality.
So, you know, again, if you want to explain this complacency, this staggering incuriosity from corporate media, you know, look at where their incentives are.
They don't want to antagonize the NFL.
They don't want to antagonize big pharma.
They do want to support Joe Biden.
They want to support Anthony Fauci.
By the way, to circle back to the DeMar Hamlin issue and Anthony Fauci, remember that even though Anthony Fauci has never treated DeMar Hamlin, to my knowledge, he's never met DeMar Hamlin.
He went on national television after that incident and he declared definitively on CBS News.
I put the post up on my social media.
He declared definitively that it was comodiocortis, which became suddenly a common phrase that Americans had never heard of and suddenly knew.
But here's the problem.
If you look into it, that explanation doesn't hold water at all, that diagnosis, because comodiocortis is an extremely rare problem that results generally from teenage boys most of the time who are underdeveloped, don't have really strong chest bones and muscles yet, and take a shot from a high-speed projectile, often a baseball, to the chest, and it can cause massive cardiac arrest.
None of that happened.
None of that is the case with DeMar Hamlin.
Steve Cortez, check out his sub stack.
He does a great job, Steve.
Thank you so much.
You bet.
Thank you.
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War of Attrition and Peace End 00:15:47
Joining us now is Colonel Douglas McGregor.
Colonel, welcome back to the program.
Love having you on and our audience is just enthusiastic every time you come on because you're clear and also contrarian to the nonsense that we see on television from the military industrial complex.
What is the latest in Ukraine?
Is it true that Russia is likely planning a blitz or a major offensive in the coming weeks?
Well, I think the major offensive, Charlie, has actually already begun.
It's not beginning the way we would begin an offensive.
One of the things the Russians made explicitly clear is that they were not interested in this shock and awe business.
That's not how they do business.
So what we're watching at the moment are a couple of things that your audience needs to know.
First of all, the numbers of artillery strikes, rockets, missiles, hardshell artillery has risen dramatically.
Most of it, not all of it, but most of it is focused on destroying air defense, air defense radars, air defense capabilities.
And that is logical because once you've stripped away the air defense, then there is nothing to interfere with your own close air support as well as all your other standoff attack, missile, and rocket systems.
Secondly, they've marshaled an enormous number of forces down in the south of Ukraine on the east side of the Dnieper River and moving from left to right from Zaborosha, which is near the river, over to Bakhmut, which everybody's heard a great deal about, and then up to a place called Lima, near IMAN, close to the Oxal River.
That's about a four, three, four hundred kilometer stretch.
And they have marshaled roughly 250 to 300,000 troops there.
And then in the western part of Russia, another 100,000.
And what we're seeing is an incremental rollout of these forces.
These are many of them mobilized forces.
They are led by combat experienced commanders.
But many of these troops have not seen combat to this point.
And they're being positioned to break through and then head north and west to essentially recapture all of eastern Ukraine.
Do you think it's likely that Russia will be able to accomplish that before the mud season kicks in?
I think it's possible.
I think they're less concerned about the mud season at this point, simply because once you are north of the line that I just described, it's fairly open rolling terrain, which makes it easier for you to control what moves in it.
You have no difficulty finding targets that you want to destroy, and your forces don't have much trouble moving.
If they were still down in the Donbas to the south, then that would be a larger consideration.
So I would say certainly within the next 30 to 60 days, I would expect what I just described to happen.
What do you think is Russia's overall goal with the war at this point?
It seems that they're willing to continue to escalate this, send more troops.
And so what does success look like right now for the Kremlin?
Well, I think success for the Kremlin would be an end to this war, to be blunt.
I think both the Russian people and the government would like to see this thing end.
They'd like to negotiate an end to it, but they're certainly not going to walk into a negotiation where they're told, well, you have to accept guilt, quote unquote, for the war, which they really didn't start.
And then they're not going to give up all the terrain that they've already seized, which was largely occupied by Russians.
Remember, their initial demands, if you will, were pretty modest.
You give these two republics in the Far East autonomy.
You give neutrality to Ukraine and ultimately recognize that Crimea is ours.
They're not going to fall back on those now.
They're going to demand neutrality for whatever form of a Ukrainian state exists, but it's going to be significantly reduced in size in a territorial sense.
The problem is that we don't seem to be interested in negotiating.
And so the other fallback position for the Russians, and a gentleman just came back from Moscow told me this very recently.
The Russians are prepared for a 30-month war with us.
In other words, they've amassed all the ammunition, the equipment, and the capabilities they need to fight us for two and a half years.
They don't want to, but they're prepared for it.
Can you just go a little deeper on that, on how Russia views war versus how the West views war, views war?
They have a different philosophy.
They're willing to sacrifice greater numbers.
They are willing to engage in a war of attrition.
This is a concept that a lot of Westerners, it's foreign to us.
Well, I think that's misleading, Charlie, to be frank.
I think they've been very economical with Russian lives.
All of the commanders have tried to maximize the use of standoff firepower, missiles, rockets, artillery, to do as much damage as possible.
And they've been very successful.
75% of Ukrainian casualties have been caused by those systems.
So they have had great success in restricting the exposure of their troops to close combat.
Now, that won't be possible in the future once the breakout occurs.
It'll be more difficult.
But the Russians have never taken the heavy casualties that the West insists they've sustained.
The West is running around with some crazy number of 200,000 casualties, pure nonsense.
I'd be surprised if they had 50,000 to 60,000 casualties and more than 20,000 dead.
It's the Ukrainians that have suffered terribly.
So I think on the one hand, yes, attrition is part of this, but the attrition is focused on the Ukrainians.
And the maneuver will follow the attrition.
Once it becomes clear that the Ukrainians are completely broken, and they're pretty close to it right now, and they fall apart, then the maneuver will commence.
Now, how far will they go?
If they have to, they'll go all the way to the Polish border, all the way to Moldova, all the way to the Romanian border.
I don't think they want to.
They never did.
This whole thing has blown up to an extent that they did not anticipate.
And they're hopeful, I'm sure, that we will wake up and decide this is a bad idea.
There's no evidence for that, Charlie.
And I think the ball is ultimately in the court of the Europeans.
Excuse me.
Yeah, and thank you for clarifying and correcting me because, quite honestly, I hear repeatedly from people, it's just a matter of Russia throwing enough people at the front line.
For example, you know, this is General Milley.
I'd like to have you respond to this.
Cut 38.
Russia has the numbers.
They have the numbers several hundred thousand.
And then he continues, play cut 38.
They are attacking in the Donbass right now.
Their progress is slow.
It's a war of attrition.
They're taking heavy casualties.
Their leadership and morale is not great.
And they're struggling mightily.
However, they do have numbers.
And as you know, President Putin did a call-up of several hundred thousand, and those folks have been arriving on the battlefield.
So they do have numbers.
And whether or not they're successful in oppressing the fight, that remains to be seen.
But that fight has been going on.
What is your reaction to General Milley?
Everything that Milley said should be applied to the Ukrainians, not the Russians.
We estimate that as many as a million Ukrainians have been shoved in front of the Russians down in the Donbass.
Remember, they started with a regular army of about 450,000 with 200,000 trained reserves.
Most of that is either killed or wounded.
And then they've replaced them with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, frankly, who had little or no training and were forced into the front lines.
So everything he said applies to the Ukrainian side, not the Russian.
Russian morale is very good.
Russians are not suffering terribly at all.
All you have to do is look at the stuff that is posted online and you find plenty of confirmation for the good health and high morale of the Russians.
But the Russians naturally want an end to this.
That's true.
Every soldier who has to fight wants the war to end.
And you hear the opposite in the Western media repeatedly.
I want to play this here: 41.
NATO says Putin is not preparing for peace.
He's launching new offensives.
But he says the training of the Russians is not the same level as the Ukrainian forces.
When I heard this, I just failed to believe that somehow the Russian army is not as adequately trained as the Ukrainians.
It just doesn't make any sense.
It defies logic.
PlayCut 41.
Almost one year since the invasion, President Putin is not preparing for peace.
He's launching new offensives.
So we must continue to provide Ukraine with what it needs to win.
What Russia lacks in quality, they try to compensate in quantity.
The training doesn't have the same level as the Ukrainian forces, but they have more forces.
And the Russians are willing to send in those forces and take a higher number of casualties.
Colonel, your reaction.
This is a material that could be lifted from any history book about the Soviet army in 1942, 43, 44, where they very definitely did what Mr. Stoltenberg describes.
Doesn't apply today, not at all.
In fact, quite the opposite.
The second point is Mr. Putin cannot prepare for peace.
I'm sure that he would prefer to do so, as everybody involved in this would.
The problem is that we continue to promise more and more equipment, more ammunition, more tanks, better tanks, fighter aircraft, you name it, telling the Ukrainians to fight on to the bitter end.
Under those circumstances, what do you expect the Russians to do?
The Russians are doing what they know they have to do.
They have to destroy the Ukrainian armed forces.
That's what they're getting ready to complete right now.
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How do you think the West is going to respond if and when Russia is able to take more territory?
I think the West will scream and holler, but ultimately do nothing.
They understand the risks are enormous.
If we interfere with ground forces, air forces in the war in Ukraine, we will end up in a direct confrontation with Russia.
No one in the Department of Defense wants that, and everyone in the Department of Defense has warned the president we're not prepared for that confrontation.
That's fascinating.
I hope you're right, Colonel.
I hope that the West backs off and doesn't want to continue to escalate this.
I've not seen any evidence of that so far.
It seems that we're willing to send $100 billion in sophisticated armaments and weaponry.
And I sure hope that there's some sort of negotiated peace settlement and ceasefire.
What would a peace structure look like and who could negotiate that?
The first thing is there can be no preconditions to peace talks.
In other words, we've got to sit down with the Russians without any demands of any kind.
We've got to listen to them.
Then we have to respond and hammer out something that will ultimately serve everyone's interests.
And no one is going to come out of this with everything that they want.
One thing is absolutely certain, and that is that we have to sign up for neutrality for Ukraine.
That's absolutely non-negotiable.
And it's in our interest, Charlie, to do that.
A neutral Ukraine between Russia and NATO is a wonderful buffer that both sides can appreciate.
But other than that, when it comes to territory, that's going to be a give and take.
It's going to be determined, I suspect, in large part, by where the Russian forces are when we finally decide to negotiate.
And of course, that's a bad way to do business on our side because we have to expect that the Russians will ultimately roll everything up to the Nieper River.
I'm afraid that a lot of people are going to continually unnecessarily die, and it's only going to put us in a more and more precarious situation.
So, Colonel, I want to ask you about the unidentified flying objects.
What do you know about this, and how should we think about it?
Well, I wouldn't waste a great deal of time on it.
I think the whole balloon hysteria is coming unglued right now.
As I understand it, we're now close to admitting that we shot down a weather balloon that belonged to the U.S. Weather Service.
I'm not sure, but I wouldn't be surprised.
One of my friends, a classmate from West Point, called me and said, you know, Doug, these people are so stupid.
We could buy a balloon online, fill it with helium, attach a teddy bear to it, put a Chinese flag in the teddy bear's hand, and they'd use a $400,000 missile to shoot it down.
I mean, this has reached the point of absurdity.
The Chinese have 300 satellites orbiting the planet.
At least a third of those have a military application.
They have access to the same technologies of intelligence collection that we do.
They can read the names on gravestones.
They can listen to whatever Dr. Jill says to President Biden tonight when they go to sleep.
So who are we kidding?
Why would they need a balloon to do anything?
I think this has been maybe at best a distraction and at worst an embarrassment.
So this weekend was the Super Bowl and the players' management, waste management, and I live nearby, and I saw the Goodyear balloon.
And then, right as the Super Bowl was beginning, there was a major flyover.
I said, they're going to shoot down the Goodyear balloon.
I know it.
They're going to shoot it down.
Well, I'm glad you mentioned the Goodyear blimp because for any of these balloons to carry a payload of technology that would actually provide the kind of surveillance that we're looking for or that the Chinese were looking for, it would have to be the size of a Goodyear blimp.
Shifting Gears to China Threats 00:01:39
And these things have all been far, far too small to do that.
So do you think this is overblown?
Is it our own government being incompetent against itself as has been happening for some time?
Is this a threat to the homeland?
What's your conclusion of it?
I think someone in the Air Force saw this thing and said, well, it's probably a weather balloon or they're accustomed to it and did nothing.
And then we decided, and when I say we, I suspect the Biden administration to make something out of it.
Is it incompetence?
Probably some of that.
I don't think that the North American Air Defense Command is incompetent.
I don't think the commander is.
I don't think he reacted because we've seen lots of trash blow at 30,000, 40,000 feet along the jet stream from west to east for a long time.
Stomach decided to make this an issue and pin it on China.
There's a lot of Chinese hysteria in Washington right now, Charlie.
Sometimes I wonder since they've already made a mess of this war with Russia and the Russians are ultimately going to triumph and everybody here knows it.
Maybe now it's time to shift gears to China and start something else.
I hope not, but sometimes I get that impression.
The appetite for war never ceases in the kingdom of Washington, D.C. Colonel Douglas McGregor, thank you so much.
Excellent as always.
Thank you, Charlie, for all the great work you do.
Thank you.
Talk to you soon.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email me your thoughts as always, 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.com.
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