The End of the American Empire? with Col. Douglas Macgregor and Vivek Ramaswamy
In one year, the global order will be radically different. That, at least, is what Col. Douglas Macgregor is predicting. Col. Macgregor claims Russia is on the brink of a sweeping and total victory in Ukraine, while a new diplomatic deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia, negotiated by the Chinese Communist Party, heralds the end of the U.S. dollar's global dominance. Charlie explores this ominous forecast, then talks to presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who has quickly set himself apart as the sharpest critic of the Biden bailout of Silicon Valley Bank.Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Charlie Kirk Show Intro00:01:42
Hey, everybody.
Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, Colonel Douglas McGregor joins us to discuss the latest with Russia and Ukraine.
And then Vivek Ramaswamy believes it's a bailout and it's wrong to help the depositors of Silicon Valley Bank.
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Welcome back, everybody.
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Last week, we covered several stories.
There was a significant amount of foreign policy news that we did not get a chance to cover.
And we have a fabulous guest to help make sense of the very confusing at times news that's happening overseas.
Colonel Douglas McGregor joins us.
Colonel, thank you so much for joining the program.
Several topics I want to explore with you.
China's Influence on Iran00:03:21
The first of which is this news about Iran and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia restoring diplomatic relations as it was pushed along by China, it seems.
And Iran and Saudi Arabia actually seemed closer to war a couple years ago.
And there's a lot of religious reasons for that and sectarian reasons, see Shia and Sunni Muslim.
But it seems as if they're having restoring of diplomatic relations and China's brokering it.
What's the takeaway here?
I think we need to come to the realization that for reasons of finance and economics, our grip on things is weakened.
To be frank with you, the Russians have now visited with the Saudis.
Now the Chinese have been to visit with them.
And the Saudis are preparing, like much of the non-European world, to exit use of the dollar.
They see us, frankly, as falling apart financially and economically.
They don't have much confidence in our ability to protect them.
And they see a better way ahead with Russia and China, both of whom have enormous influence over Iran.
Much better influence over Iran than we do.
So I think this is one of several steps that you're going to see in the future.
Remember that China and Russia are both members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
And the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is building a financial system that is external to ours.
In other words, most of the world wants to dump the U.S. dollar.
And you can see that happening in our banking sector right now.
Why?
Because frankly, we're debasing their currency.
Whenever they do business in dollars, we pass our debt on to them.
Our debt is now, what, 33, 34 million, something, a trillion in that department.
Nobody wants to do business with us anymore.
And what is it safe as the kind of new 21st century geopolitics is setting in that China is now the one that is not just trying to broker deals between Iran and Saudi Arabia, but also they're the only ones talking about a ceasefire or potential peace deal with Ukraine and Russia.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, the thing that Americans don't understand because they've been propagandized for years in the wrong direction, China is not interested in war with anybody.
China is entirely about business and prosperity and self-enrichment.
They are going to be the dominant power in Asia for reasons of economics and finance.
It has nothing to do with military power.
So they're in a position to visit with Zelensky after they visited with Putin and probably offer a deal of some kind.
I suspect the Chinese will say, if you're willing to come to a new territorial arrangement with Russia, we will bankroll your restoration, your reconstruction.
The problem for Zelensky is that he's entirely dependent on the Cabal in Washington and the Kolomoyski and Soros and other oligarchs, if you will, in the West.
So I doubt seriously he'll take the deal.
But I think that's what the Chinese will ultimately do.
The Chinese want desperately to build rail lines to carry commerce and commodities and services back and forth between Europe and China, Japan, and Korea.
The Fiction of the Ukraine War00:09:55
Central Asia can be stable now thanks to Russian influence and control.
The problem they've got right now is Ukraine.
Ukraine is in the way of that commercial traffic and that economic relationship.
So they want peace desperately.
They don't want war.
And I think they're probably going to get it.
They're just not going to get it immediately because I don't think we'll allow it.
I'd like the latest take on the details on the ground, your latest take between Russia and Ukraine.
According to the Daily Mail, it says that Russia suffers deadliest day in Ukraine war as 1,090 men lose their lives.
And the Daily Mail says Putin's bloodlust takes horrendous toll on his own forces with bitter battle of Bakhmut raging.
What is the latest on the ground in Ukraine and how does it apply to us?
Well, all those headlines are lies, Charlie.
The Russians haven't taken those heavy casualties at all.
In fact, we think that the Russians have had, since the beginning of the war, somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 dead.
The exchange rate over the last few weeks has been about one Russian for every five Ukrainians.
The Ukrainians have been bled white, and they're getting ready for reasons that make absolutely no military sense to commit more forces to Bakhmut, which has turned into an enormous ambush, if you will, for the Ukrainians.
The Russians are happy for thousands of Ukrainians to pile in there so that they can be concentrated and become easy targets for artillery, rockets, missiles, drones, and so forth.
There's very little direct fire between the two sides in the area because the Ukrainians have simply made themselves lucrative targets.
And they've taken tremendous casualties.
We think that they're up to 200,000 dead at this point.
So you've just got to take anything that comes out of the Western media and quite frankly dismiss it.
They're all lies trying to bolster the Ukrainian cause because Ukraine is on its last legs.
Now you have the muddy season.
And the muddy season followed a very, very short winter.
The Russians opted not to attack in the winter because they just didn't get the hard freeze all over Ukraine that they need for hundreds of thousands of troops to advance.
So they've decided to sit back and the Ukrainians continue to come to them, which makes it easy for them to kill the Ukrainians.
Ukrainians have become pop-up targets.
And at the same time, you've got this terrible mud.
And the black earth in Ukraine is 10 to 15 feet deep.
So you're talking about a mud pit in which tanks and trucks and anything, frankly, on the ground that moves will just sink to the bottom.
So there's nothing going to happen in terms of major offensive operations from the Russian side until the mud dries out.
That'll take another month or two.
So I said, I conveyed a similar opinion to what you just said to a neoliberal, neoconservative recently.
And he asked me this question, and I didn't have a great response.
He said, well, then how come there has not been more territorial gains by the Russians if the Russians are dominating?
How would you respond to that?
Well, the Russians control territory that constitutes 90% of gross national product in Ukraine.
They now control all the key resources, coal, iron, even agriculturally.
They've got some great territory, but most of it is manufacturing.
What Ukraine has for a scientific industrial base, anything that is worth holding on to, the Russians have already got.
They can take the rest of it when the ground dries out if that's what they decide to do.
And the area they're sitting on top of is traditionally Russian.
The population there is in Russian.
In fact, the Ukrainians have complained bitterly in Bakhmut about the fact that the Russian people there continually informing the Russians as to their location.
And one of the reasons the battles in the Donbass have taken so long to fight is that the Russians have declined to use their conventional weapons of mass destruction, the thermobaric warheads on their heavy rocket artillery.
If they did that, the battles would be over within a day or two.
But they've got thousands of Russian citizens, Russian speakers who live in Ukraine in those areas, and they're not willing to kill them.
So the Ukrainians have naturally tried to get close to the Russian speakers.
That hasn't worked out very well for them because they tell the Russians where they are.
The Russians come in.
It's long and arduous, but eventually they kill them and drive them out.
You don't hear that on the Western media.
That is for certain.
Well, you got to remember, Charlie Putin is evil.
Anything he does is evil.
Russians are bad.
It's all nonsense.
And when we finally get to the truth, we're going to find out that the only serious war crimes committed in this war were committed by Ukrainians against Russians and against the civil population.
I mean, the situation in Iran, in Ukraine, is really desperate.
I mean, you're now dragging in boys and women to fill the slots that young men formerly filled.
He's got very few reserves left of able-bodied men.
His generals keep telling him to pull out of this, but he keeps feeding the meat grinder.
And if you're willing to come and impale yourself on the Russian defenses, there's not much incentive for the Russians to move.
Why not wipe out the Ukrainian army, what's left of it?
By the time the spring rolls around, there'll be almost nothing left.
And I think that's where we are.
Now you're talking about blackouts everywhere, all over Ukraine.
The whole energy sector is being destroyed.
There's almost no air defense left, which means the Russians can use whatever they want, aircraft, missiles at will.
Colonel McGregor, the New York Times, the CIA via the New York Times says they didn't bomb the Nord Stream pipeline.
With all your experience, who do you think bombed the Nordstream pipeline?
Well, you know, I'm told that Santa Claus and the Good Fairy died in the same car crash that killed Santa Claus and a whole host of other fictional characters.
Look, the idea that a private boat, a yacht, sailed with very dangerous and volatile explosives into the Baltic and somehow or another magically found a spot and sent divers down on their own to do this damage.
And they were allegedly Ukrainian is absurd.
There is no Ukrainian naval capability.
There's no naval capability in the Baltic other than American or potentially British capability, with some exceptions with the Norwegians and Swedes that could do this.
We did it.
Cy Hirsch told the truth.
And I'm sure that 95% of everything he said was accurate.
He may have gotten some minor details wrong, but there's no question about it.
Sei Hirsch is right.
The intelligence agencies do this via the New York Times, where they say something.
They do this all the time.
Can you just kind of talk a little bit about this, where they say something where they try to mislead you, but technically, if in many years from now declassified documents come out, they can say that, well, we told you that it was a force close to Ukrainian forces, but it's the way that they could deny it.
I mean, they're just lying by other means.
Well, look, Charlie, everything that is being told to the American people and the Europeans in the West about the Ukraine war has been largely fictional.
There's very little truth in any of it.
I mean, that was the point that I was trying to make when we last spoke.
The Nordstrom problem is very much the same.
Remember that initially the answer was, oh, well, the Russians must have done it to themselves.
That was dropped.
That went nowhere.
And now it's the mysterious elements of the non-existent Ukrainian Navy in civilian attire went out and did it.
That's absurd nonsense.
The whole narrative for this war is nonsense.
People don't understand how much they've been lied to, but this is helpful.
The bad news is the Russians know the truth.
And we effectively executed or committed an act of war against Russia, but we also committed an act of war against Germany.
The German population is quietly enraged.
And it's going to be very difficult for the Germans to stay with us much longer, whether it's NATO or it's this phony war with Russia in Ukraine.
Everyone is sick of it in Europe.
The governments haven't changed yet, but when they go down, that'll be the end of all the nonsense.
Quietly enraged.
That usually doesn't go well when the German people get quietly enraged.
History tells us that.
So kind of in closing here, what is your prediction then of the next year of how things end up getting resolved in the Ukrainian-Russian dispute?
How do you see this playing out?
Well, the first thing, Charlie, is that what's happened with the Silicon Valley Bank is going to spread to other banks.
Our national sovereign debt is finally going to come crashing down on our heads.
We're going to watch our currency debased.
We'll see an attempt to ratchet interest rates down to come through this.
None of it's going to work.
We're going to be bankrupt.
We're going to have to default.
As this happens, it's going to be impossible for us to sustain the level of support that has kept Ukraine alive, at least to the Ukrainian forces fighting against the Russians.
That's why I think Xi's visit is important.
And remember that China, Russia, India, increasingly Brazil, all of the Central Asian states, parts of Southeast Asia are all exiting the financial system that we dominate and control.
Silicon Valley Bank Bailout Risks00:15:23
Everyone is getting away from our debt.
And excuse me, these countries are now pegging their currency to gold.
And that's something we cannot do.
So we're about to enter into an entirely new world.
Within a year, the world that you see today won't exist anymore.
I just hope it's not a brave new world.
Colonel Douglas McGrether, thank you so much.
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Is it a bailout?
Should we bail them out?
Well, presidential candidate and very successful entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy joins us to discuss his op-ed for the Wall Street Journal.
SVB doesn't deserve a taxpayer bailout.
Vivek, welcome back to the program.
Good to see you, Charlie.
How are you?
I'm excellent.
Thank you.
So, is it a bailout?
Some people say it's not even a bailout.
Just we have a lot of time here.
So, just explain your whole argument for our audience.
The floor is yours.
Thank you.
It's important to understand what's going on.
So, Silicon Valley Bank is a bank in Silicon Valley that has many tech startups and tech companies as its clients, as its depositors.
What they did is they took those deposits and they invested in some risky securities, including mortgage-backed securities that lose their value when interest rates go up.
But here's the other thing: their clients, the tech startups, also do more poorly when interest rates go up, which means they need more access to cash.
So, what happened in our country to fight inflation created by Biden?
Interest rates went up.
That was a double whammy for Silicon Valley Bank, and the bank crashed.
So, what happened last night is the federal government stepped in and said that if you're a depositor at Silicon Valley Bank, one of those tech companies, you still get your money above the level that you had previously said was the rules of the road: $250,000 to protect mom and pop.
No, you get it even if you're Roku, a tech company that had nearly half a billion dollars in there, even though you made a risk management decision to put way too much money in Silicon Valley Bank without diversifying it, you still get your money back because the government's going to help you do it.
That was the decision that was made last night.
So, before criticizing it or anything else, that's what happened.
Now, I think that that is crony capitalism.
It is absolutely a bailout.
They went out of their way.
Anytime somebody issues a press release, especially if it's the government that says this is not a bailout, that tells you all you need to know.
It is absolutely a bailout.
They changed the rules of the road after the fact to help people who took risks that they shouldn't have taken to still get that bailout.
And the thing that bothers me about it, there's a lot of things that bother me about it, Charlie, but the irony is Silicon Valley Bank itself was one of those banks that was lobbying for a really long time, saying that we get to take these risks, that other bigger banks don't, that we aren't having to be subject to the same capital requirements because we're not systemically important.
The government should and will never step in to save us.
That shouldn't do that.
That's why we at Silicon Valley Bank get to do it this way.
Well, guess what?
In their hour of need, not only Silicon Valley Bank, but all of their cronies in Silicon Valley, and I know this, I got calls from many of them over the weekend trying to influence what I was saying, said that, you know what, in their hour of need, yes, we are systemically important.
Janet Yellen, what does she do?
Declares an emergency status, declaring them to be systemically important last night, and actually backstops those depositors anyway.
I think it's an egregious risk failure if you're the CFO of a multi-billion dollar company to park that much money at Silicon Valley Bank without diversifying it.
Yet, what do we do now?
We're using the public.
We're using the government to backstop that and say, that's okay.
That bad behavior, do what we do in this country in our culture anymore, reward more bad behavior.
And what do you get?
Expect more of it in the future.
And then you hear this narrative that some people put up that it's, oh, it's about the workers.
It's about the workers of those startups.
Don't buy it for a second because actually, here's how it works.
Most of those are venture-backed technology startups in Silicon Valley.
That's 40,000 of them.
That's the customer base of Silicon Valley Bank.
Here's how it actually works.
Those business models today of those tech startups, they're the same as they were two weeks ago.
They haven't changed.
So if the business still works, if it's the same business, then their investors can put in more money, those venture investors that back them.
That's painful if you're a venture investor because that means more dilution.
That's painful if you're a CEO or a founder.
I've been one before.
It's painful because you dilute your ownership in the company.
But hey, that's the consequence of making a bad decision.
That's how capitalism works.
But what they're doing is they want to hide that fact.
And they're saying, no, no, no, this is just about the workers because we'd have to fire the workers, even though the business model still works because the CFO made a big mistake.
And I think they're trying every trick in the book, Charlie, where they said, no, this is about American innovation.
These are the people in Silicon Valley who shouldn't be punished.
I heard this plenty over the weekend.
It irritates me because people in East Palestine and Ohio, here something bad happens to them.
They don't get a bailout.
But the argument is that, no, no, no, this is, these are actually the innovators of the American economy.
So even if they made bad financial decisions, they deserve to be bailed out because they're depositors.
They tried that.
They said it's about the workers.
But at the end of the day, what is this really about?
Is this a bailout for Silicon Valley?
Not for Silicon Valley Bank, but for Silicon Valley itself, the tech startups that made the poor decision of putting way too much money with Silicon Valley Bank.
But it wasn't just a bad decision.
Many of them were privately rewarded for doing it because Silicon Valley Bank had special deals with some of those founders and companies that required them to put that money in Silicon Valley Bank.
And guess what?
The taxpayers, they were never going to participate in the upside of those deals.
But guess what?
The U.S. government now is still there to backstop them when things don't go well.
So I know that was a lot there, but I just think it was important to note what's going on.
So I hope that was helpful.
Do you think there is money then in Silicon Valley or elsewhere that they could extend to these depositors?
And just to make sure I understand your argument, your argument to Roku is tough luck, you're going to take a $499,725, $725,000 haircut.
Is that right?
Yeah, just about.
That's right.
Because we shouldn't have two sets of rules in this country.
We shouldn't have one for Roku or the Rokus of the world and one for everybody else.
Okay.
That's exactly the signal that we've now sent, though, because $250,000 was the cap, they say, for FDIC insurance.
Well, guess what?
You know what?
That cap no longer applies.
It's a different rule of the road if you're a special favored darling.
So I think that's a problem.
But I also think that there's a separate issue that I want to recognize, which is there is a loss of trust right now in banking.
And so no one wants a run on the bank across America.
And I think that what the federal I argued this in my Wall Street Journal op-ed is the thing that we should see done is strongly prospectively in advance, not changing the rules after the fact, but prospectively for everybody else.
If we want to raise that FDIC threshold, we should raise it, but we should raise it for everybody evenly.
We shouldn't do it selectively for people who are in the favored class of Silicon Valley Bank depositors.
So that's a bit of my view there.
I'm not rejecting the importance of protecting those banks.
The counter to your point would be: I agree with you ideologically, but what do we, how are we going to prevent bank runs then, right?
So if we don't make Roku whole, if we don't make Etsy whole, or I'm sure there's so many other companies that would be recognizable, then you could see another 20, 30, 40, 50 banks collapse this week because people start calling for their money to be withdrawn or transferred or put into other places.
What would be your response to that?
It's a good question, Charlie.
So I laid this out in my Wall Street Journal op-ed today too, because I think it's really important to be clear.
We can separate how I think we should have handled Silicon Valley Bank from prospectively how we need to handle everyone else.
So I think the Federal Reserve is a lender of last resort.
The Federal Reserve does a lot of things that it shouldn't do, but this is one of the few things that it should.
I think that you can raise the FDIC threshold temporarily during the conditions of fear of a bank run to a higher level as a way of averting that bank run, but do it prospectively in advance without tinkering with the rules after the fact.
And then here's the thing, Charlie, is we're actually seeing a lot of that fallout today.
So it looks like what Janet Yellen did last night didn't necessarily have the panacea effect.
And I think the way I would have done it, I'm running for president, right?
Here's how I would have handled it.
If I were president right now, I mean, this is going to be a different situation two years from now, but right now, the way I would have done it is said, if you made a bad decision in the case of Silicon Valley Bank, which was poorly mismanaged, no bailout, no amnesty, or else you're actually going to just create incentives for more of that bad behavior in the future.
But prospectively, we're changing the rules of the road for everyone together, not picking favorites after the fact, but everyone together to say that we'll temporarily raise the FDIC cap to a level significantly higher than $250,000 and use the Federal Reserve as a lender of last resort to shore up confidence.
In some ways, Charlie, I actually think they actually, we actually have the worst of all worlds where for years, Silicon Valley Bank and the federal government claimed that these would be the kinds of banks that you wouldn't save, that would be fine to let die if they make bad decisions, because they're not systemically important.
What did they do last night, Janet Yellen and the federal government?
They invoked an emergency rule, emergency authorization.
There's always emergency rules.
It's always emergency, right?
It's just fear mongering.
It's a fear mongering.
What they do is they effectively say that this is an emergency.
Do you think that inspires public confidence?
So this idea that you're actually preventing the bank run by doing some extraordinary thing to save a bunch of Silicon Valley tech startups that you said you were never going to save, not only are you not solving the problem, you might even be throwing kerosene on the underlying fire.
And that's a possibility that ironically, no one's actually considered.
And here's the other thing.
People in Silicon Valley, they had an incentive this weekend.
It was a little ugly to watch, to be honest with you, but I think it's important to see it honestly.
They had an incentive to create the risk of a bank run in the rest of the country.
Why?
Because the bigger that perceived risk was, the more likely it was that as of Sunday night, before Monday morning, before there's that Monday morning bank run on America, they got bailed out, those tech startups did.
So in some cynical way, kudos to them.
You know, they won the game of crony capitalism.
But at the end of the day, that's not good for the country.
And I think people need to get accustomed to understanding the incentives of the people they're hearing from, from Mark Cuban, from David Sachs.
I'm not impugning these guys personally.
I'm just saying that when you listen to them, you need to understand that their portfolio companies and maybe even their own portfolios are banked with Silicon Valley Bank.
And so the bigger perception there is for a national emergency, for a national bank run, the more likely it is they were going to get bailed out first.
And so I think that's a big part of what was going on here that people missed.
And I got plenty of calls over the weekend that really...
Without saying any names, do you think some of the leading voices are actually personally exposed here that they actually were above the threshold significantly and they stand to lose tens of millions of dollars?
Yeah, I think the way it plays out is more that they're portfolio companies.
So a lot of venture investors were pushing this, but their portfolio companies had exposure at Silicon Valley Bank.
Absolutely.
They're following self-interest, but I think people who are listening to them need to see through that.
And they had some skewed incentives this weekend to create the fear of a bank run in America, to fearmonger.
And, you know, it's similar.
I mean, there's some parallels.
This is a little abstract, but even to the Ukraine situation, the way you deter Russia isn't by doing it directly, but by doing it via Ukraine.
Here, the way you save the system is by saving Silicon Valley Bank rather than just focusing on the system.
It's a form of argument you see often these days, Charlie.
I want to explore this because I also am curious, did it go through, did we exhaust every private option to potentially purchase Silicon Valley Bank?
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Give us an update.
How is it running for president of the United States?
What do you see and what are you hearing?
It's a lot of fun, actually.
I'm enjoying engaging in open debate across the board.
One of the things I've enjoyed doing is also, and I think it's going to be something I'm going to double down on this campaign, Charlie, is I'm going to debate the left in their own home turf.
I mean, I've gone on CNN.
I've gone on CNBC.
I think we need more of that in this country.
And I think the good news is what I've discovered is we're able to win.
You take the debate with reason and logic.
We win every time.
And so I'm looking to be an ambassador to actually advance that agenda.
I'd say the disappointing part about this is just the corruption that I see in the entire process.
It's been eye-opening coming in as an outsider.
I mean, I'm going in to fight corruption in the federal government.
I've been one of the only candidates to actually talk about express ways of how you actually gut, fire, constitutionally take the guts out of the federal administrative state and bureaucracy.
But the eye-opening part is, you know what, it starts at home.
I mean, the RNC, I've called on Ronna McDaniel how many times to just clearly state the rules of the debate.
She says she wants a loyalty pledge.
Well, if you want a loyalty pledge, how about just saying what the rules are for actually making the debate and how you're going to conduct it?
You know, this idea of a consultant who calls me and, you know, it's a broken system is the answer.
I think that is to be commended.
Check out Vivek's website.
He's gaining a lot of momentum.
He's a great guy.
Now, Vivek, one of the kind of pillars of your presidential campaign is to try and push back against all these woke idea pathogens.
I mentioned on Friday that Silicon Valley Bank seemed very interested and invested in DEI programs and all this other stuff.
I didn't say that was the only reason, but I said I venture to guess that it played into the culture and the prioritization of things that don't matter over things that do matter.
Small Business Loyalty Pledge Debate00:04:59
Do you think that's fair here, Vivek?
Can you talk about how Silicon Valley Bank was very invested in DEI and Pride Month?
Sure.
And now they don't have a company anymore.
Sure.
And I call it like I see it, Charlie.
And I've been, as you know, no greater opponent of woke capitalism in America in the last few years than me.
But I'm not going to claim that's the essence of the story.
It was what we talked about before, but it's a side story that matters.
So their head of risk management out of the UK was issuing her own lived experience as a queer person of color without actually just how about focusing on risk management if that's your function at a bank.
And risk management was actually a big failure at this company.
But it runs deeper than that, Charlie.
People miss this.
It's not just the hypocrisy of it or the distraction factor.
It's part of the game itself.
So they made a commitment last year of $5 billion.
You don't think about that?
That's a staggering number.
$5 billion to sustainable finance and green initiatives, to literally their words, not mine, to ensure for a healthier planet.
How about a healthier balance sheet instead of focusing on a healthier planet?
You would say that in retrospect, but it's part of the game because it's virtue signaling to this administration.
This was just last year.
And what do they do in their hour of need?
Who do they depend on?
They depend on, guess what? the current administration to show up and help.
And in some ways, you could say the gambit paid off because they're bailing out the depositors of that bank and the culture that created that ESG virtue signaling.
So in a certain way, ironically, Charlie, because of the bailout of those depositors of those businesses, tech companies that bank there that shouldn't have, you know what?
They were vindicated because that virtue signaling has a role to play in the way the whole charade works out.
Yeah, it's an interesting point you make here because I do have a heart for people that are running virtuous small businesses and really trying to make it.
But the picture that you're painting, and I want to make sure I'm understanding this accurately, is that Silicon Valley was also a major underwriter of these highly speculative, incredibly woke, sometimes financially risky companies.
And when people like Rokana and others go on and say, you know, you're going to see so many small businesses and entrepreneurs fold, that's not, it's not exactly a true picture.
These are people that also have venture funding and they didn't want to overly dilute themselves, right?
And so then can you talk about that for a second?
Yeah, so they're now using the lexicon.
I just had a debate with somebody else on a different podcast on this with, you know, David Sachs, who's a venture capitalist and a good guy, but very self-interested lens that I think affects the way that they analyze this problem.
These are not the small businesses that most people think about when they think about American small business.
These are venture-backed tech startups.
You look at their business plans.
It's how they get to be a trillion-dollar company and make billions of dollars for themselves.
But now claiming, hey, it's just small business status.
If I put, why were they, why were they able to put?
Let me ask you this, these small businesses, tens of millions of dollars, or even in certain cases, hundreds of millions of dollars in Silicon Valley Bank.
The answer is it's not the kind of small business that they're using as the connotation to argue for now.
And you know what?
If they made a bad decision, many of those are worthy businesses.
They're innovative businesses.
I'm not knocking the business models.
I'm a fan of innovation in this country, including venture-backed innovation.
But when you make that mistake and you have a capital hole, then your investors or those business models, if they really work, you can attract equity capital from someone else.
But you know what happens when someone else puts in equity capital to your company?
Yes, you get diluted.
So that's that's unfortunate.
These founders would rather have debt than actually dilute their shares.
Exactly.
And Silicon Valley Bank was one of the unique institutions that provided venture debt to those founders, which allowed them to preserve motor ownership.
There you go.
But part of the deal is that they bank with Silicon Valley.
So that's the part that people haven't really seen here.
Yeah.
And so I guess the last question is, was this actually ever opened up for a private actor to come in?
Because again, if some of these are really phenomenal decisions, wow, okay, you're doing a great job here.
You got 30 employees and you were appropriately underwritten.
I mean, JP Morgan could have come in and said, we're going to go buy your best 100, right?
I mean, was this even open up for public auction?
The federal government said, we don't even want to entertain that.
We're just going to invest in those companies.
With a business.
You could invest in those companies.
But it was fearmongering.
It was fearmongering over the week and said, there's going to be a bank run on America unless Silicon Valley Bank specifically is bailed out by Sunday night before Monday market opens.
Well, that's what they ended up getting in the end because that's a lot easier of a way out to just say, hey, I'm the CFO of Roku.
I park half a billion dollars or nearly that in one bank, unstable bank, Silicon Valley Bank.
Hey, I get vindicated.
That's a lot easier than selling shares and diluting yourself.
And so, you know, the game was played and unfortunately they won.
Got to run Vivek Ramaswamy.
Check out his website.
He's gaining a lot of momentum.
Vivek, appreciate it.
Thanks so much.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for listening.
Everybody, email us your thoughts.
As always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening and God bless.
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