The Charlie Kirk Show - The Coming Real Estate Cataclysm? with Paul Martino and Kurt Schlichter
Aired: 2023-04-27
Duration: 33:19


=== Retaking Pennsylvania School Boards (08:33) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey everybody, it's And the Charlie Kirk Show.
[00:00:01]  Paul Martino tells us how we can retake our school boards.
[00:00:05]  He's doing that in Pennsylvania.
[00:00:06]  I talk about the looming economic collapse coming through a type of real estate that's not talked about very often.
[00:00:12]  And then Kurt Schlichter, unfiltered about Tucker, Fox News, the conservative movement, and more.
[00:00:17]  Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:00:21]  Get involved with TurningPointUSA today at tpusa.com.
[00:00:25]  That is tpusa.com.
[00:00:27]  Start a turning point usa chapter at tpusa.com.
[00:00:32]  Buckle up, everybody.
[00:00:33]  Here we go.
[00:00:34]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:00:35]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
[00:00:38]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:00:41]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:00:44]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:00:45]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:00:46]  His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
[00:00:53]  Turning point USA.
[00:00:55]  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.
[00:01:04]  That's why we are here.
[00:01:06]  Brought to you by the Loan Experts I Trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at andrewandTodd.com.
[00:01:15]  Paul Martino joins us, who is the chair of Back to School Pennsylvania PAC.
[00:01:20]  It's a very powerful story.
[00:01:21]  It's a great story.
[00:01:22]  National Review rights: Pennsylvania teachers, activists concocted bogus LGBTQ bullying epidemic for political gain investigation fines.
[00:01:31]  Paul, welcome to the program.
[00:01:32]  Tell us about this story.
[00:01:34]  Charlie, I'm thrilled that you're able to cover this story because what happened in our district is just unbelievable.
[00:01:40]  Once the left lost the school board as a result of their bad COVID policies in 2021, they decided that they would do anything in their power to discredit the current board.
[00:01:51]  They concocted this strategy to make up a fake bullying epidemic.
[00:01:56]  And the report was issued by Dwayne Morris demonstrating that they actually had a teacher who refused to report incidences of bullying so that he could instead go to the ACLU and complain.
[00:02:07]  We then had one of the own school board members, one of the Democrats on the school board, then sick the Office of Civil Rights on our district.
[00:02:14]  It is disgraceful behavior, and everybody needs to understand that this is what's going on.
[00:02:19]  Yeah, so let's just take a step back.
[00:02:21]  Tell our audience about your activism.
[00:02:22]  Is it true?
[00:02:23]  You got over 160 school board members elected in Pennsylvania?
[00:02:27]  That's correct.
[00:02:27]  We backed over 300 candidates, primarily in the wake of COVID and the horrible policies that locked down our schools.
[00:02:36]  And so the district that we're referring to was one of the places where we got three new members elected to flip the board majority.
[00:02:43]  And boy, we really pissed them off when we flipped board majorities.
[00:02:46]  And they decided that they were going to teach us a lesson.
[00:02:49]  And it's disgraceful behavior.
[00:02:52]  So tell us more about the lesson that they were trying to create.
[00:02:55]  I mean, this is all bogus.
[00:02:56]  This is kind of part of a theme of like fake hate crimes, if you will, or fake bullying.
[00:03:02]  Walk into the synthetic, walk us through the synthetic nature here.
[00:03:05]  That's right.
[00:03:06]  And our school board member, Karen Smith, who actually called the Office of Civil Rights, we're thinking about renaming her Karen Smith-Smolette.
[00:03:13]  We think that that might be an appropriate way to kind of understand what happened here.
[00:03:19]  And so there are, of course, incidences of bullying in any district the size of Central Bucks.
[00:03:24]  The incident rate is actually low in our district, as the report demonstrated.
[00:03:28]  It's actually below the state average.
[00:03:30]  But if incidences are not being reported and you show up to the school board meetings talking about how this is a rampant problem, you can create a narrative that gets the ACLU to investigate the district unfairly.
[00:03:42]  That's why we had to spend all of the money at the school board level to go do this investigation.
[00:03:47]  By the way, Charlie, they blamed us for spending that money for the investigation.
[00:03:50]  So let me make sure I understand this so our audience does.
[00:03:53]  So the activists made up a set of situations.
[00:03:58]  They covered up bullying reports from a kid who said they were getting bullied because they were LGBT.
[00:04:04]  Is that right?
[00:04:05]  Or did they make up?
[00:04:06]  Exactly right.
[00:04:07]  Okay, so how did they cover it up?
[00:04:11]  Walk me through that.
[00:04:12]  So there's a teacher named Andrew Burgess who had multiple incidences of reporting of an LGBT kid who was unfairly harassed.
[00:04:21]  There's no question that this happened.
[00:04:22]  It is disgraceful that this happened to this poor kid.
[00:04:25]  But instead of going through the proper channels in the school to report this up through the chain, he sat on those reports.
[00:04:32]  He sat on those reports as evidenced by this investigation so that he could claim that there was a systematic problem of the district not investigating such claims.
[00:04:42]  The only systematic problem was he wasn't reporting them.
[00:04:45]  Right.
[00:04:46]  So by sitting on it, that then warranted the ACLU to come parachute into your school district.
[00:04:53]  That's right.
[00:04:54]  And it's because he did it.
[00:04:55]  It's because he hurt the kid.
[00:04:57]  This is the part that is the most gut-wrenching of all.
[00:05:00]  This poor kid suffered because Burgess's political agenda was more important than actually getting the kid the help he needed.
[00:05:07]  And it became a huge local story, if I'm not mistaken, right?
[00:05:11]  Just massive amounts of protests and all that.
[00:05:15]  And so now is there backlash against the people that did this?
[00:05:19]  Yes, we've had multiple stories written about this.
[00:05:21]  It's part of the reason I'm on this program.
[00:05:23]  We need to call out this behavior because people have contacted me, Charlie, all around the country telling me, you know, I think stuff like this is going on at my district as well, where people are intentionally hiding the ball so that they can create a national story.
[00:05:35]  Central Bucks is in the most purple part of one of the most purple states.
[00:05:39]  So what happens in our backyard, people pay attention to.
[00:05:43]  And I know, unfortunately, that this case is not the only case of this kind where someone sat on reports so that they could get national attention to their political cause.
[00:05:51]  So if they would have gone through the process, there wouldn't have been much there there, right?
[00:05:56]  It just would have been investigated and handled.
[00:05:58]  There would have been complaints.
[00:05:59]  That's right.
[00:06:00]  There would have been complaints.
[00:06:01]  Those complaints would have gone up the proper chain of command.
[00:06:04]  I'm sure some of them would have been resolved.
[00:06:06]  I'm sure some of them required further intercession from the school district, but the district would have known and been able to do something about it.
[00:06:13]  But since they weren't reported, you can then go complain that the district did nothing about it because you intentionally didn't report it.
[00:06:21]  That is the behavior that we're just so frustrated by.
[00:06:24]  So, and also death threats then were sent to conservative school board members.
[00:06:29]  Let's give you a taste of that play cut 59.
[00:06:32]  You can't even manage your weight, you fat idiot.
[00:06:36]  You think you should be in charge of children?
[00:06:37]  You're an ignorant, psychologically weak, and damaged waste of scum.
[00:06:41]  And it's just very unfortunate your mother didn't abort you in the first place.
[00:06:46]  Miss Piggy Fat.
[00:06:49]  Hopefully a semi-truck plows into you today for the betterment of humankind.
[00:06:53]  Your ignorance is on full display and you will be judged accordingly by history.
[00:06:58]  So this was a death threat sent to a conservative school board member.
[00:07:02]  Is that right?
[00:07:03]  That's right.
[00:07:04]  And it was sent in our hometown where the motto of the left in our hometown is hate has no home here.
[00:07:10]  So we always enjoy when we get death threats in the town that says hate has no home here.
[00:07:14]  And relentlessly from there, what is a big lesson you want other parents across the country to derive from this unfortunate saga?
[00:07:23]  When you hear stories about systematic problems, you ask the kids, you ask the teachers when, where, how.
[00:07:31]  If it's just an anecdote or it's in the ether or, oh, I heard a story, you need to think twice about that.
[00:07:38]  But if you can get told, this happened on Tuesday, this was the people in the room, et cetera.
[00:07:43]  So everyone in your audience needs to understand instances like this do actually happen where there is bullying.
[00:07:48]  Get the specifics.
[00:07:50]  Don't let them create a false narrative that this is a widespread problem without actual evidence that something happened as opposed to just a story that gets told.
[00:07:59]  You were able to be very successful winning a lot of these school board races.
[00:08:02]  Tell us how you were able to do that and how that model might be able to spread to other states.
[00:08:06]  So obviously, we ran specifically in 2021 about the school closures.
[00:08:11]  2023, we're going to be back at it again, primarily now on the learning loss from those school closures.
[00:08:17]  So we haven't decided exactly how aggressive we're going to be in the state of Pennsylvania this year in 2023, but we're going to be back at it defending the boards that we already elected, as well as putting new people on boards who are going to address the learning loss that we're still suffering from those policies in 2020 and 2021 from.

=== Secure Prices for Good Meat (02:22) ===

[00:08:33]  Do you have a website that you would like to plug or a way that people can support you?
[00:08:37]  I think the most important thing to do right now is to go to Central Bucks Forward.
[00:08:41]  Central Bucks Forward is the website of the candidates who are actually running to go address this problem in my home district.
[00:08:49]  We'll talk more about the more nationwide or statewide stuff, but please go to Central Bucks Forward, see the candidates.
[00:08:56]  We have great candidates running who won't do this kind of thing and call the OCR on a nonsense report.
[00:09:03]  Let's get the right people elected.
[00:09:05]  Paul, thank you so much.
[00:09:06]  Appreciate you coming on.
[00:09:07]  Thank you.
[00:09:10]  Look, we're already a few months into the new year.
[00:09:12]  And if you haven't changed the way you buy meat, you need to right now.
[00:09:16]  So look, goodranchers.com, promo code Kirk is amazing.
[00:09:21]  Good Ranchers, you're able to lock in your price and avoid meat inflation.
[00:09:25]  You enjoy the highest quality meat in America.
[00:09:28]  And my code, by the way, gives you $20 off.
[00:09:31]  Here's the thing.
[00:09:32]  I'm going to tell you more and more reasons throughout, but the bacon that they send tastes so good.
[00:09:37]  And by the way, bacon's actually could be very good for you.
[00:09:39]  Stop listening to those doctors that tell you not.
[00:09:41]  Now, look, too much of anything is bad.
[00:09:43]  But if you actually, you might be cholesterol deficient.
[00:09:47]  You need to get good fats in your diet.
[00:09:48]  It literally helps your brain.
[00:09:50]  The pigs are never in crates that the bacon comes from, which happens to happen way too much on factory farms.
[00:09:56]  Good Ranchers never uses antibiotics or adds any hormones.
[00:10:00]  And their pork is from heritage breeds that have historically produced the best pork in the world.
[00:10:05]  Reason number two to subscribe to Good Ranchers is that you lock in your price when you subscribe.
[00:10:09]  My grocery bill would go up every week if it weren't for Good Ranchers.
[00:10:12]  I consistently get the same quality and quantity of meat every time.
[00:10:16]  So subscribe and enjoy the security of their price slot guarantee.
[00:10:19]  And finally, also, it's because everything they sell is so good.
[00:10:23]  They're all natural burgers, USDA steaks, and more.
[00:10:26]  So head on to goodranchers.com and use promo code Charlie for $20 off your first box.
[00:10:32]  Free bacon, great meat, and a secure price.
[00:10:34]  And a bonus, $20 off today.
[00:10:36]  Support our show.
[00:10:37]  Support American Ranchers.
[00:10:39]  And by the way, if you are on this meatlist stuff, you got to knock it off.
[00:10:42]  That's all a bunch of crap.
[00:10:43]  You've got to go to goodranchers.com, get real meat, feed it to your kids.
[00:10:47]  It's the most healthy thing you could do.
[00:10:49]  Goodranchers.com, American Meat Delivered, GoodRanchers.com.

=== Banks Collapsing and Office Space (05:23) ===

[00:10:55]  Right here in the New York Times, I'm going to mention the, I'm going to finish the podcast argument in a second, but this is a really important piece here in the New York Times.
[00:11:02]  If you were to ask me five years ago, let's pretend you run an insurance company.
[00:11:06]  Insurance companies do a lot of investments because they have to turn an investment, they've got a return on their deposits, essentially, because so many people are sending them money.
[00:11:15]  And so if you were an insurance company, a pension fund, private equity fund, if you were to say, Charlie, what is a blue chip investment?
[00:11:22]  Where can I park my money where regardless how the economy goes, regardless, it's just going to be stable.
[00:11:29]  It's just going to be reliable.
[00:11:34]  Self-storage would be at the top of the list.
[00:11:36]  It's been a good investment.
[00:11:38]  Nursing homes would be at the top of the list.
[00:11:41]  That would be a good investment.
[00:11:43]  And then office space.
[00:11:45]  Those would be the top three.
[00:11:47]  It would be nursing homes, self-storage, and office space.
[00:11:53]  Front page of the New York Times, it's a buried lead here.
[00:11:57]  Office market in dire straits in Manhattan.
[00:12:00]  This is going to result in major economic disruption.
[00:12:04]  New York City's biggest corporate landlords had it great for years, benefiting from a booming economy in a city where companies clamored to set up offices from low interest rates.
[00:12:14]  That buoyed the economics of an industry built on debt.
[00:12:18]  It's true.
[00:12:19]  Those days are over three years from into the pandemic.
[00:12:22]  Floors of office buildings throughout Manhattan have been emptied by tenants who have shrunk their footprint and employees who work from home.
[00:12:29]  Now, there's another rate, another problem.
[00:12:31]  Rapidly rising interest rates have intensified concerns for the New York City office market, the largest in the country and a pillar of the country's economy.
[00:12:42]  It's a pillar of the city's economy.
[00:12:43]  It could be a grave risk.
[00:12:44]  Geez, the font is so hard.
[00:12:45]  It's hard to read some of this.
[00:12:47]  That one-two-punch could be worse than anything corporate landlords have experienced.
[00:12:51]  It goes on to say more than two-thirds of all commercial real estate loans are held by small and medium-sized banks.
[00:12:57]  Let me read that again.
[00:12:58]  More than two-thirds of all commercial real estate loans are held by small and medium-sized banks.
[00:13:06]  This very well could be a way to eliminate small and medium-sized banks.
[00:13:10]  This commercial real estate collapse is going to happen in the next six months.
[00:13:14]  It's already happening.
[00:13:15]  But if you have a 15% occupancy, you can't even pay the note.
[00:13:20]  You can't pay anyone.
[00:13:22]  You're done.
[00:13:23]  You can't pay your investors.
[00:13:24]  You can't, I mean, and these commercial real estate buildings are incredibly leveraged.
[00:13:30]  It's a total wipeout.
[00:13:32]  If you're at 15 or 20% occupancy, I'm not an alarmist.
[00:13:36]  I'm not a guy that says, oh, the economy is going to fall apart.
[00:13:38]  I'm telling you right now, the next economic disruption is not going to come through single-family homes.
[00:13:44]  That actually looks pretty healthy, believe it or not, in certain areas of the country, especially in Arizona.
[00:13:49]  Single-family homes, they're selling in 20 to 30 days.
[00:13:51]  Prices are down 10 or 15%.
[00:13:52]  They might go down another 10%, but it's not going to be a collapse.
[00:13:56]  15% occupancy, work from home COVID.
[00:13:59]  I'm telling you, you are going to see people that are billionaires in real estate get to nothing if this is the case.
[00:14:06]  And the New York Times has a great job here.
[00:14:07]  Matthew Hagg, it's a very good article.
[00:14:10]  It's not political.
[00:14:10]  It's just a regular article the way the New York Times used to be.
[00:14:13]  Very rare to see, where he says that it's primarily built on debt.
[00:14:17]  You better believe that's true.
[00:14:20]  That these guys will go raise $100 million in equity and then they'll go borrow $600 million and go say, okay, and by the way, the bank will happily do it because this is a blue chip loan.
[00:14:32]  So if you try to buy, for example, a home, a $5 million home, a $10 million home, the bank will require 30% down.
[00:14:38]  It's a jumbo loan.
[00:14:39]  If you try to require, if you try to get a single family home for an investment property, that's $1 to $5 million, they'll do 25% down.
[00:14:45]  If you're a single-family home between $750,000 and $1.5 million, 20% down.
[00:14:51]  But they consider those to be a higher threshold of risk, right?
[00:14:55]  Office space never was looked at that risk because the risk department, the underwriting department at these banks, they'd say, no, these are easy.
[00:15:04]  These are great.
[00:15:04]  This is free money for us, free money for them.
[00:15:07]  And so we're going to give you 10% down, 15% down.
[00:15:13]  So you bring $150 million, you get a billion-dollar office building.
[00:15:16]  Yeah, you got to carry the note.
[00:15:17]  But if you're at 50% occupancy, you're printing money.
[00:15:21]  And you know how many real estate investment trusts, REITs are in this country that are about to go under?
[00:15:28]  Article continues.
[00:15:29]  The consequences extend far beyond the balance sheets of cities' landlords who borrowed billions.
[00:15:36]  But this could go throughout the entire economy.
[00:15:40]  Unless something dramatically changes over the summer, unless we have millions of people that say, you know what?
[00:15:47]  I actually want to go work in an office space when we have tighter margins and higher inflation.
[00:15:54]  You're going to see economic disruption that is very significant.
[00:16:00]  I don't want to say it's going to be 2008 because that was scary because it involved people's own homes, but banks will collapse.
[00:16:06]  You will see dozens of banks collapse if this is the case.
[00:16:09]  I hope that's not true.
[00:16:10]  I hope there's something I'm missing here, but it is unsustainable what is happening right now in commercial real estate.

=== Watching Tucker Carlson's Future (15:20) ===

[00:16:19]  Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
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[00:17:16]  Check it out.
[00:17:19]  Joining us now is Kurt Schlichter.
[00:17:21]  So Tucker is no longer at Fox.
[00:17:24]  Your immediate reaction?
[00:17:25]  I was stunned.
[00:17:27]  I mean, holy cow, that was so out of the blue that, you know, this is the guy who's the biggest thing in conservatism since Rush Limbaugh.
[00:17:36]  And I think what it is going to mean is a real transition for the whole conservative media landscape.
[00:17:46]  Before we had, you know, we were still in the process of identifying by organizations.
[00:17:53]  You know, I'm a Fox viewer or I'm viewing this entity or that entity.
[00:17:58]  I think now with Tucker out there, we've got the ability to individually brand in a way that we never had before.
[00:18:07]  So it's going to be, you know, hey, I'm following Tucker wherever he goes.
[00:18:11]  If he's on my Roku, that's fine.
[00:18:13]  If he's on my podcast, he's fine.
[00:18:15]  If he creates his own entity, he's fine.
[00:18:18]  And I think we're going to see down the road, Charlie, particularly if somebody figures out how to do it correctly, technically, people really curating their watching across a variety of outlets for a variety of individuals.
[00:18:31]  So you pick and choose.
[00:18:32]  I'm going to watch Charlie Kirk from here to here in the morning, and then my device will automatically go over here to this other organization that has Tucker, and then this other organization that has somebody else.
[00:18:44]  The era of network TV and traditional cable, I think this is part of the sunset.
[00:18:51]  So, Kurt, I want to just kind of get your speculation.
[00:18:55]  What was Fox thinking here, right?
[00:18:57]  You're a lawyer.
[00:18:59]  I mean, what were they thinking?
[00:19:04]  What is the calculus?
[00:19:06]  Well, look, Charlie, we've seen a hundred different explanations.
[00:19:09]  Everything from Rupert Murdoch has become Logan Roy in succession to he doesn't like, you know, oh, I want to see the Logan kit, the McLachlan Murdoch rapping, but that's a whole different other thing.
[00:19:27]  We've seen that maybe Murdoch doesn't like Tucker's religious angle, or maybe it has to do with the Dominion settlement, or maybe it's this Abby Grossman case.
[00:19:36]  Everybody's speculating.
[00:19:38]  One thing we know for certain, Fox is a very hard-edged business.
[00:19:44]  And if it thinks it's to your advantage to let a star go, it will look what happened with Bill O'Reilly.
[00:19:50]  He brought us Tucker.
[00:19:52]  Bill O'Reilly was at the top of his game.
[00:19:54]  He became a liability.
[00:19:55]  Fox decided we're better off without him.
[00:19:58]  Audios built.
[00:19:59]  Well, people made the same decision for Tucker.
[00:20:01]  It was Bill and Megan Kelly simultaneously, right?
[00:20:04]  They were dominating prime.
[00:20:06]  It was Megan, Bill, Hanny.
[00:20:09]  One, two, three.
[00:20:10]  And then all of a sudden, you lose Bill and you lose Megan in a span of about nine months.
[00:20:15]  But Tucker came in and shocked the world.
[00:20:17]  I mean, they didn't, I don't even think Fox executives anticipated Tucker becoming the number one host in the history of Fox News on average over a seven-year period.
[00:20:29]  I don't think they expected it either.
[00:20:30]  But what Tucker did, first off, he managed to essentially negotiate almost complete freedom of action.
[00:20:39]  And he took it in a way that brought in kind of the populist segment that really liked and appreciated Trump.
[00:20:49]  Now, look, you will see out there, there are a lot of Trump voters who will tell you flat out, I am a Trump voter.
[00:20:54]  I am not a Republican.
[00:20:55]  There are a lot of people who are Tucker voters, right?
[00:21:00]  Who are not Fox viewers.
[00:21:02]  Yeah, that's exactly right, Kurt.
[00:21:04]  You know, I've asked, again, this is not scientific, just, you know, talking one off to 30 people.
[00:21:10]  And I say, are you going to still watch the network?
[00:21:12]  Nope, nope, nope.
[00:21:13]  Across the board, you know, canceling Fox Nation.
[00:21:15]  It could be just an echo chamber because I'm around a bunch of right-wingers.
[00:21:18]  Yeah.
[00:21:19]  No, I see it.
[00:21:22]  You know, look, I don't have a beef with Fox.
[00:21:25]  Fox has been very good to me.
[00:21:26]  I've done a lot of Fox hits in my day, and I like several of the folks there.
[00:21:31]  Hell, I graduated from high school in San Mateo, California, right down the street from Greg Gutfeld the same year he did.
[00:21:38]  Okay, I like Fox in concept, but I'm not going to watch it every day the way I did because Tucker's gone.
[00:21:46]  Tucker was always there, and I used him, and I think a lot of people used him, Charlie, like an internet service because I would DVR him, and then I would watch what parts I wanted to later at my convenience.
[00:21:59]  I did not say, oh my gosh, Pucker time.
[00:22:02]  It was always Tucker time because I was in control.
[00:22:05]  And I think that's going to make it really easy for him to go on an internet system.
[00:22:11]  Maybe he goes to Twitter with Elon Musk.
[00:22:13]  Who knows?
[00:22:14]  Maybe he creates his own thing back to Daily Caller.
[00:22:17]  I don't know.
[00:22:18]  Salem?
[00:22:18]  Who knows?
[00:22:19]  I don't.
[00:22:20]  But I do think he's going to continue to be successful.
[00:22:24]  And I think I'm not sure where the energy is going to go in Fox because you've got a guy like Hannity and Hannity's been there forever.
[00:22:35]  And a lot of people are like, okay, seen that, done that.
[00:22:41]  And he's got his fans and he does well.
[00:22:44]  But Tucker was a phenomenon.
[00:22:46]  And are they willing to have another phenomenon?
[00:22:48]  Because if you have a phenomenon, they can be dangerous.
[00:22:54]  Bill O'Reilly was edgy.
[00:22:56]  Tucker was edgy.
[00:22:58]  Megan Kelly, to some extent, was edgy.
[00:23:00]  Yes.
[00:23:00]  And you've got that tension.
[00:23:03]  Again, I write about at Town Hall tomorrow, a piece called You Strike Down Tucker Carlson.
[00:23:08]  He'll become more powerful than you ever imagined.
[00:23:11]  That's my shout out to you, Star Wars-loving virgins out there.
[00:23:16]  You know, there's a tension in Fox between wanting to serve a conservative audience that's underserved.
[00:23:24]  It goes for the 50% the other networks actively hate, but while wanting to remain mainstream in the sense that it's objective and not necessarily a cheerleader, at least in the news portions.
[00:23:36]  So, there's always attention at Fox.
[00:23:38]  And if you get so far off the reservation at Fox, they may decide they don't need you anymore.
[00:23:44]  I think that might have been what happened with Tucker, but that doesn't mean Tucker's doomed.
[00:23:49]  I think Tucker's going on to.
[00:23:50]  No, I think Tucker's going to be fine.
[00:23:52]  I have multiple, you know, I'm saddened because having a network with someone like Tucker in the central canon of cable distribution, which is 110 million homes, there's only four channels, right?
[00:24:04]  People are like, oh, just create a new one.
[00:24:06]  Not the way it works.
[00:24:06]  These are grandfathered-in deals of CNN, MSNBC, HLN that nobody watches, CNBC, and Fox.
[00:24:14]  That's it.
[00:24:14]  That's the core canon of DirecTV, Spectrum, and Comcast.
[00:24:19]  That's it, right?
[00:24:20]  And so there's obviously other options, but people look, you know what it's like saying?
[00:24:24]  It's like saying, I go to Old Country Buffet and I want sushi.
[00:24:27]  It's like, well, it's not there.
[00:24:28]  So I'm just going to eat what's there.
[00:24:29]  Okay.
[00:24:30]  You're going to eat what's in front of you and you're not going to necessarily.
[00:24:33]  Some people might go leave to go get sushi, but you're going to go eat the food in front of you.
[00:24:37]  That's the menu in front of you on the cable channels.
[00:24:42]  Yeah, I think, look, I think more people are going to leave for sushi.
[00:24:45]  Now, look, I am, I am old.
[00:24:47]  I was born the last week of the baby boom.
[00:24:49]  You're younger, but even younger than you.
[00:24:51]  You know, I look at my kids and I've never, other than a cartoon, I've never seen them watch a television program.
[00:24:58]  The idea that they would come down and watch a specific television car is completely alien to the way they and their kids conserve consume media.
[00:25:07]  Now, guys like me, I grew up, you know, I grew up on the three networks and the weird UHF channels.
[00:25:13]  Okay.
[00:25:14]  So I, you know, my viewing habits ingrained from ancient times are, you know, you watch the show and it's been modified now using the DDR and everything.
[00:25:27]  But those crazy kids today, the future audience for conservative media is not out there watching shows the way we used to think of shows.
[00:25:37]  So, and the Fox, you know, Fox audience skews older.
[00:25:42]  It just does.
[00:25:43]  But then again, there's a lot of the content out there aimed for younger folks.
[00:25:49]  Your stuff, the Joe Rogan, Daily Wire stuff, it's presented in a very friendly way to these young viewers who have completely different viewing habits.
[00:26:01]  And that's not a judgment.
[00:26:03]  It's just a found that you're better or worse because you consume media differently.
[00:26:08]  But it's the job of a company like Fox to protect its shareholders by understanding that.
[00:26:13]  I don't know how well they do.
[00:26:15]  It's going to be interesting to watch.
[00:26:16]  I think they'll be teaching about it at Harvard Business School if we don't match due to the funded endowment with the next Republican Congress.
[00:26:24]  I don't know if that's kind of what I'm hoping for.
[00:26:25]  Not going to have anytime soon.
[00:26:27]  I hope so.
[00:26:27]  Yeah, it's going to be fascinating to see if the boycotts will stick.
[00:26:32]  I mean, the ratings came out.
[00:26:33]  Actually, I don't know if the ratings came out for yesterday.
[00:26:35]  Monday, they were down.
[00:26:36]  So Tucker usually averaged 3.1 to 3.5 million.
[00:26:39]  So Kill Mead's replacement, they were at 2.5.
[00:26:42]  So it went down about 800,000, you know, almost immediately.
[00:26:46]  Some of those just might have been curious viewers who are like, what's going on tonight?
[00:26:49]  So we'll see what it sustains.
[00:26:51]  My guess is they're going to get down to 2.2, 2.3 in that time slot.
[00:26:57]  Now, whether or not, you know, they put, now, mind you, Jesse is on paternity leave.
[00:27:04]  So there's really no, there's no handoff.
[00:27:06]  They might get as low as 1.8.
[00:27:08]  And I don't know if they care, though, Kurt.
[00:27:10]  I think at least what I am getting is they want their advertisements back.
[00:27:16]  They want the boycotts gone.
[00:27:18]  They don't want to be hated anymore.
[00:27:19]  They want to go back to the cocktail parties and they want to become RNC TV.
[00:27:22]  They're done with the fight.
[00:27:24]  They don't care if it trims their margins a little bit.
[00:27:27]  Rupert Murdoch is worth $17 billion.
[00:27:29]  He's like, honestly, I'd rather be worth $11 and be reaccepted in decent and civil society and be able to have, you know, I want to, he's like, I want Dylan Mulvaney ads back on Fox, right?
[00:27:42]  They yearn for that kind of flow of trans capital.
[00:27:46]  I think that's kind of what is the desire here.
[00:27:50]  It's more ideological and comfort-driven than even money.
[00:27:55]  So, Kurt, just to summarize here, the, you know, your lawyer, what was the legal thought, though, on the Dominion case?
[00:28:04]  Is there something I was missing?
[00:28:05]  It just seemed to be such a weak case.
[00:28:08]  Look, it was going to lose once they got up to the right level of the court.
[00:28:12]  I mean, probably the United States Supreme Court, it probably would have lost in front of this judge because he was a seemed to be a liberal judge and didn't rule the way I would have ruled on the motions.
[00:28:24]  I think the Court of Appeal wouldn't have gone their way.
[00:28:26]  I think the Delaware Supreme Court wouldn't have gone their way.
[00:28:30]  I think it probably, I think the United States Supreme Court probably would have taken it, not just because of the money, but because it's an important free speech case.
[00:28:39]  The fact that it is legally meritless is not the only factor to consider.
[00:28:47]  Clearly, Fox thought it was better not to go through the trial for whatever reason.
[00:28:53]  And that could have been, you know, they didn't want the testimony that might have come out, including by Rupert Murdoch, to come out.
[00:28:59]  They just wanted to put it behind them.
[00:29:01]  They still have some other cases, too.
[00:29:03]  Keep that in mind.
[00:29:06]  Keep also in mind that their insurance companies are probably paying a substantial, if not all, of this settlement, okay?
[00:29:13]  Because companies, you know, insure themselves against defamation verdicts, and big companies get big excess policies.
[00:29:20]  And there are probably some insurers right now, you know, going down to the underwriting department and slapping people around.
[00:29:28]  But I think, look, I think it was terrible.
[00:29:32]  It's not formal legal precedent because it's not an appellate court decision.
[00:29:36]  But as informal precedent, it shows that it is possible to use lawfare to attempt to silence and punish speech.
[00:29:49]  That's well said.
[00:29:50]  I want to play a piece of tape here.
[00:29:51]  Here is Abby Grossberg making some accusations against Tucker Carlson, Play Cut 63.
[00:30:00]  He was looking for ratings, bait, purely, and was also looking for power.
[00:30:05]  It was a combination of ratings and power and manipulating the audience and manipulating also the political system.
[00:30:12]  There was an aspect of, I can pick who the House Speaker is.
[00:30:16]  I can pick who the President of the United States is or who the Republican candidate's going to be.
[00:30:22]  And I thought that was really dangerous and didn't want that kind of power.
[00:30:26]  I didn't want to have Senate candidates calling me and being very upset.
[00:30:33]  Are you going to destroy our whole campaign tonight?
[00:30:35]  Because he could do that.
[00:30:37]  Just one little flavor of many.
[00:30:39]  I mean, Kurt, it seems like that legal challenge could be moving forward or not.
[00:30:44]  It remains a question.
[00:30:46]  So let me ask you a bigger question.
[00:30:48]  If Fox becomes RNC TV, how does that impact us heading into 2024?
[00:30:54]  Well, look, I don't know how if Fox loses credibility by picking a side in the Republican primary, all it's going to do is get the people on the side it kicks and everybody else will tune out.
[00:31:10]  That's where we remember, Republicans are the abused wives of American politics.
[00:31:16]  And we're done.
[00:31:17]  We're not going to take the abuse anymore.
[00:31:18]  We're going to walk out the door.
[00:31:20]  And it is a, you know, so it's very dangerous for Fox.
[00:31:24]  If they don't play it right down the middle within the Republican context, they're going to find, you know, if they're anti-Trump, they're going to see Trump supporters go away.
[00:31:33]  If they're too pro-Trump, they're going to see people who support someone else go away.
[00:31:37]  And they've got a tightrope to walk.

=== Republicans Walking Out on Abuse (01:39) ===

[00:31:39]  As far as Abby Grossman goes, and you know, I defend people in sexual harassment suits, and I bring sexual harassment suits.
[00:31:47]  I've done both in public and out of the public eye.
[00:31:51]  And what she was talking about was not about sexual harassment.
[00:31:54]  What she was talking about is, I don't know what the heck she's talking about.
[00:31:58]  She doesn't like that Tucker Carlson had a lot of power.
[00:32:01]  Okay, not a sexual harassment thing.
[00:32:04]  And if you're morally, if you have moral problems with a very popular and respected commentator having the ability to influence things, I have two bits of advice.
[00:32:16]  The first is grow up.
[00:32:18]  The second is quit and do something else.
[00:32:22]  I don't understand why conservatives bring into the fold people who are obviously not part of the team.
[00:32:30]  And I don't think she was.
[00:32:31]  I don't think she's a conservative.
[00:32:33]  I don't think she likes the movement.
[00:32:35]  Really quick, how can people support your books?
[00:32:37]  Plug whatever you want.
[00:32:38]  Go get my new book, Inferno.
[00:32:40]  It's part of the People's Republic series, How's Act for Subtlety, the Kelly Turnbull Action Series.
[00:32:46]  A lot of fun.
[00:32:47]  Go read my town hall columns.
[00:32:48]  I have a good one tomorrow on Tucker Carlson.
[00:32:51]  But you can read them every Monday, Thursday, and Wednesday.
[00:32:55]  And follow me on Twitter at Kurt Schlichter.
[00:32:58]  Very good.
[00:32:59]  Kurt, thank you so much.
[00:33:00]  Appreciate your time.
[00:33:01]  Thank you.
[00:33:01]  Thanks for having me.
[00:33:05]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[00:33:06]  Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:33:09]  Thanks so much for listening.
[00:33:11]  God bless.
[00:33:14]  For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk dot com.