Reviving American Manhood with Sen. Josh Hawley and Steve Friend
For America to be revived, there must first be a revival of American men. Sen. Josh Hawley joins Charlie to discuss his new book Manhood, how the Bible offers many heroic male role models, and why the concept of "toxic masculinity" misses the mark so badly about what ails America. Plus, whistleblowing federal agent Stephen Friend describes how the FBI has been warped into a weapon aimed at Americans, with agents ordered to hit quotas on so-called "domestic terrorism."Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Stepping Up for Families00:09:54
Hey everybody, Tan the Charlie Kirk Show.
Senator Josh Hawley joins us to talk manhood and then the FBI, a pretty amazing whistleblower, joins us to tell us about what's really going on in the FBI.
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Welcome back, everybody.
You know, on my week off, I was watching The Last Dance.
I almost keep, I only have a Netflix subscription really to watch like three things, and that's one of them.
We used to have a country back then.
Someone who wants that country back and is also fighting for a return of masculinity.
Can't say that.
Senator Josh Hawley.
Senator, welcome back to the program.
You have a new book out, Manhood, The Masculine Virtues America Needs.
Oh, this one's going to get some warm response from the low testosterone crowd at the New York Times.
Senator, tell us about your new book.
Well, thanks for having me on, Charlie.
The premise of the book is really simple.
America needs stronger men, period.
We need men who are going to step up and provide for their families.
Heck, we need men who are going to start families to begin with.
Men are not a threat.
Strong men are not a threat to our democracy, as the left says all the time.
Strong men are the key to our democracy, to preserving it, to renewing it, to reviving it.
And so what the book is about is what does it look like to be a strong man and holding up role models, looking especially at the Bible, the faith of our fathers.
You know, what does it look like to be a good man, to be a husband, to be a father, to be a warrior, to be a builder, somebody who contributes something, and to be a priest, as I say, somebody in touch with eternity and a king, someone who's going to bring order and goodness and freedom to where he goes.
So the book is all about encouraging men.
It's about building men up.
It's about putting out role models.
And it's about calling them to something higher.
So the opposition will say this is toxic masculinity.
And Senator, there's a war on men in our country, a deliberate one, where, and we're seeing it with the suicide rates, with disenfranchising, young men that are just disconnecting from society altogether.
I'm sure you're going to be doing as much media as you're allowed on this.
But Senator, how will you respond to, you know, a critic that says, oh, no, no, toxic masculinity is the issue in America?
You know, the problem with the left is, Charlie, they say that all masculinity is toxic.
And I talk about this in the book.
I mean, if you look at what they actually say, the so-called leftist experts, they say stuff like, healthy masculinity is like healthy cancer.
And we've got to take that head on.
The problem isn't that masculinity is toxic.
The problem is we have lost touch with what masculinity is, thanks largely to the left.
Thanks to them saying things like, if you're a boy and you want to be a boy, there's something wrong with you.
If you want to go out there and provide and protect that there's something wrong with you, saying that traditional manhood contributes to the systemic evils of America.
All of that's false.
All of that is false.
We need to tell the truth to men, which is that they are needed.
We need to tell them we need you to be strong.
We need you to step up.
We need you to get married.
We need you to have kids.
We need you to get a job.
We need you to provide.
And guess what?
Doing those things is how you will leave a legacy, how you will change the world, how you'll change this country.
And that's what the book says.
And we need every functioning society needs a balance of both the feminine and the masculine traits.
And we've gone way too far in the feminine direction.
You can actually dig, and you can go too far in the masculine direction.
We all acknowledge that, right?
You can get too totalitarian, not compassionate enough, but we're so far in the feminine direction.
We never asked the question, what does toxic femininity look like?
Whereas society has zero influence on the masculine.
And so if you go read this 1970s booklet, this stuff they used to teach in sociology class, where they said, here are masculine traits and feminine traits.
Let me just read a couple of things on the feminine traits.
Gets overly offended too easily, dependent on others, passive, impressionable, subjective, emotional, and likely to be impressionable by others.
That sounds like almost where society has gone.
You need a balance of both, right?
And when men are absent from that, the entire society, the homeostasis, the balance of society goes out of whack.
Yeah, and you know what I think the left is really pushing today, Charlie, and all of the intelligentsia, it's really androgyny.
I mean, their message to men is don't be a man.
Their message to women is there's no such thing as womanhood.
That's why biological men can now be women if they want to be.
There's no such thing as gender.
It's this androgynous consumerism.
That's the message of the left.
And to men, their message is, hey, just go down to your basement, mom and dad's basement, turn on a screen, enjoy yourself.
Just sit there, look at that screen, play some video games, watch some porn.
You know, just be a good little consumer.
Don't rock the boat.
And what America needs is more men who want to rock the boat, who say, no, I'm going to turn that screen off.
I'm going to go up.
I'm going to get a job.
I'm going to go out on a date.
I'm going to ask a girl to get married.
I'm going to have a family.
I'm going to provide.
And I'm going to stand up for myself and those I love.
That's what this country needs.
Yeah.
And it's the complaint I get from men.
We have a men's summit at Turning Point USA, and it's doing unbelievably well.
We have a waiting list for our next one.
And Senator, this is why I'm so excited about your book.
Just to replug it again, manhood, the masculine virtue America needs is the country's falling apart for a lot of different reasons.
Young boys are not really demanded to grow up into a man.
It's almost these grown infants, right?
So you mentioned something interesting.
You say some either biblical or historical figures.
Tell us a couple of those.
Teddy Roosevelt, maybe you talked about Moses, who I think is one of the great figures of the Bible, who was really a man's man in a lot of different ways.
Who are some of the men of the Bible or of history you talk about in your book that we should try to emulate?
Well, let's start first with the Bible.
And Charlie, I make no apologies for the fact that I spend a lot of time talking about Bible stories in this book.
Listen, the Bible has been the foundation of Western culture.
It is truly the faith of our fathers.
It has been the ancient faith of this nation and the bedrock of our system of government.
So for all the haters out there like, oh my gosh, he spends a whole book and tells a whole bunch of stories from the Bible.
Yeah, exactly right.
And I apologize not at all.
In fact, if you're offended by that, you probably should read the book.
And more importantly, you should probably go read the Bible.
But I would just, let's pick one of those stories.
Let's pick David.
He's one of my absolute favorites.
A king, a warrior, you know, also a poet.
I mean, you talk about a guy who really has it all.
I mean, he shows the masculine virtues.
And I talk about him as a warrior.
I talk about him as a king.
I talk about him as a leader, as a priest, somebody who was in touch with the eternal, right?
And brought a sense of the eternal everywhere he went.
Also imperfect.
You know, and that's part of the message to men is nobody expects perfection.
I'm not perfect.
You know, he wasn't perfect.
So it's not perfection that we're after.
As men, you know, we know that, hey, our lives aren't perfect.
It's okay.
It's not about being perfect.
It's about being better.
It's about being what you can be, who God has called you to be.
And I hope that the stories that I tell are really about encouraging men to say, okay, how can I get better?
How can I be better at my job?
How can I be better as a husband?
How can I be better as a father?
Better is what we need.
In Genesis 12, it sets up the entire narrative of the Old Testament because we have this guy, Abram, that out of nowhere.
So we have, you know, we have creation, we have the fall, we have Cain and Abel, we have Noah, we have the flood, we then have the city of Babel.
And all of a sudden, history kind of starts in Genesis 12, where I think there's a lot of parallels where Abram, leave your father's home, man, go on an adventure.
I think we need a little Abram, eventual Abraham energy in our culture.
Don't you agree?
Absolutely.
And boy, you've got, you have nailed it, Charlie, in terms of just the story of the Bible there and how so significant the call of Abram.
And we need an Abram-Abraham generation, right?
A generation of men who say, gonna leave dad's house, gonna get out of the basement, gonna go on an adventure that is basically to go start a new world.
What does God call Abraham to do?
He says, Abraham, I'm gonna change the destiny of the world through you.
Come follow me.
Leave what's safe.
Leave what's known.
Leave what you're comfortable with and go out to where I am leading you.
Go start a family.
He says to Abraham, go get married.
Go have a kid.
Go start a family.
Go do something that's wild and crazy, right?
And take a risk.
And it doesn't always go well.
I mean, Abram didn't act correctly when he went down to Egypt with Sarah.
He had a lot of different opposition.
I mean, Sodom and Gomorrah, probably rather tragic, you know, for him to witness.
But, you know, even earlier than that in the scriptures, Genesis 2, 24, this is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife and they become one flesh or he cleaves to the flesh.
And so we're called, it's a biblical commandment.
And we wonder why are so people, you know, upset and depressed.
Summer Meat Deals and Risks00:02:28
There's a rhythm to our existence that we are suppressing with the excesses of modernity, one of which is you can kind of become this androgynous, metro-sexual, dopamine screen addicted person and you become miserable and depressed.
And you're wondering, is there more to life?
There is.
And I want to talk about fatherhood, Senator.
You're farther ahead in the journey than I am, but I find it to be important to kind of celebrate it to young men, but also be honest about the challenges, about the difficulties.
But the most masculine thing a young man can do today is not post some Instagram photo with an AR-15 eating bacon without your shirt on.
Like, yeah, okay, man.
No, it's get married, stay loyally married, stop watching pornography and have children.
That is challenging.
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Blue Collar Jobs for Men00:05:43
Senator Josh Hawley is with us.
Check out his new book, Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs.
So, Senator, just walk us through the why you wrote this book, because you're a senator.
Usually, when senators write books, there's one of two books, right?
Which is I'm going to run for president book, and I just kind of regurgitate the same 25 stories of American history and with platitudes and the same chapter titles, ghost written by the same very average Washington, D.C. book writing people.
Or the second book is some sort of policy book, right?
You know, here's something I care about, which was your other book and was super important, right?
But you're doing something that's in a third category.
You're going after third rail.
You're going after a major issue that's going to irritate the press.
Talk about why you as a senator, with everything you've going on, are deciding to write this book.
Yeah, it's really easy, actually.
I'm a father, and that's what prompted me to do it, Charlie.
I've got three kids.
You've met my kids, my boys.
My two oldest are boys, and I've got a baby girl.
So my boys are 10 and 8 now.
And as my boys get to the age where I begin to think more and more about, okay, you know, how am I going to help them?
How am I going to do my duty by them as a dad?
How am I going to help them grow up to be the men that God called them to be, the men America needs them to be?
That's what got me thinking about this book.
And I just think about the young men who I once upon a time taught back when I taught law for a while.
When I think about the young men I had the privilege to meet all over Missouri and all over this country.
And I've had young person after young man after young man say to me, man, I just feel like they're not great role models out there.
So I wrote the book to put forward what I think is once upon a time our culture's vision and is still the Bible's vision of what a good, strong man is.
And then we talk about it, that he should be a husband and a father and a builder and a warrior and a priest and a king.
And I go through and I tell stories from the Bible.
I tell stories from American history.
I tell stories from my own life, people who were significant to me.
And it's about putting forward that positive vision and calling men to be all that they can be, which is what this country needs them to be.
Amen.
And so let's get through some just application, right?
So do you think there's any legislative opportunity here, or is this just more of a cultural fight?
Well, I do think that there are legislative applications for sure, Charlie.
And one of them is, and I talk about this in the book, look at the jobs that are available to men.
It used to be in this country, you could get a blue-collar job and you could support a family on it.
And you were proud of that.
Now, it's still true that 70 plus percent of men in this country do not have a four-year college education.
And they shouldn't have to have one in order to get a good paying job.
But the liberals in this country, and unfortunately, a lot of Republicans too, have made it incredibly hard.
We have sent those jobs overseas.
We've sent almost 4 million of them to China.
So you want to talk about application here.
We need to bring back good paying blue-collar jobs in this country.
So men can start a family, can support a family on one income, and can do it by working with their hands, working at a trade, working at things that make them proud.
And the elites in this country have made that almost impossible.
So the number, I'm going to approximate here, but American Compass did the numbers and Oren Cass, but it's been proven through third-party peer-reviewed research.
In the 1980s, it was about 38 weeks a year to support, work a year to support a family of four, 38 weeks.
Now it's 53 to 54.
You might say, well, Charlie, it's not 53 or 54 weeks in a year.
Exactly.
That means you have to go into debt.
Or, Senator, this is where the left goes really nuts.
The female, the wife, is forced into the workforce.
Now, the ideal should be to be able to support the family that in critical developmental years, that the wife is not forced to go get another income, especially years from birth to 10 years old.
Every piece of psychological literature shows that a present mother around for those times is irreplaceable.
Senator, can you, a minute and a half, just riff on that a second?
Yeah, absolutely right.
That what has happened, what the policy elites have given this country is a place where it is, first of all, if you're a blue-collar worker, it's increasingly hard to get a job in a trade.
Number two, it's hard to get a job that pays anything.
Let me cite some more statistics.
Since the year 2000, almost 4 million, 4 million blue-collar jobs have gone overseas to China.
60,000 we have lost in the state of Missouri, 60,000 just in the state of Missouri.
So what do we need to do?
We have got to get an economy that actually works for blue-collar men because that will be good for families.
That will be good for churches.
That will be good for neighborhoods.
And the left doesn't get this at all.
And too many Republicans don't get it either.
They talk about, oh, gains of trade, and we all get richer.
No, what's happened is the white-collar workers sitting in their air-conditioned offices in Wall Street, they've gotten richer.
Blue-collar workers have gotten poorer.
And it's not just about money, Charlie.
It's about families.
It's about kids.
We've got to change.
And it's about morale.
The local school district sees a 20% decrease in tax revenues and the factory is closed.
And then opioids come in and suicides go up.
And work is not everything.
But again, remember it says in the Ten Commandments, you shall work for six days and rest for one.
It's actually a two-part commandment.
Working is commanded by God.
So is rest.
But all of a sudden you get rid of work.
It destroys the morale and the purpose, especially for young men.
Senator, thank you so much.
The book is Manhood, Masculine Virtues America Needs by Senator Josh Hawley.
Thanks so much.
Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
Are you tired of feeling burnt out and struggling to stay productive throughout the day?
Does brain fog and short-term memory loss keep you from functioning at your best?
Well, I did too.
FBI Agents Facing Intimidation00:15:20
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Joining us now is Stephen Friend, author of the new book, True Blue, My Journey from a Beat Cop to Suspended FBI whistleblower.
Boy, this is going to be interesting.
Stephen, welcome to the program.
Thank you very much for having me.
Stephen, tell us your story.
Well, I've lived a few years in the last six or seven months, but I'll try to invest my summit down as quickly as I can for you.
I was with the FBI in 2014 until February of this year.
Spent my first seven years working on Indian reservations in the Midwest.
And then in 2021, relocated my family to Florida with the understanding I was going to be working child pornography cases.
But after a few months, I was reassigned to work domestic terrorism with the understanding that that was mostly going to be January 6th cases.
And that is when I had my first exposure to how the FBI is departing very greatly from its rules for carrying forward investigations.
I had a couple of other alarming experiences that were associated with January 6th, and it ultimately led me to decide to come forward to my supervisor, my frontline supervisor, and make some protected whistleblower disclosures about my concerns about the rule departures and the heavy-handed tactics that the FBI is using.
And that then started a process by which I went up the chain of command and expressing my concerns at every level, but was rebuffed, told throughout that process that I was jeopardizing my career, that my duty was to the FBI and not the Constitution, not the oath that I took.
And it culminated with my suspension unpaid last year in September.
For 150 days, I was unpaid.
I had my medical information leaked to the New York Times.
I had an improper gag order placed on me by the FBI's inspection division.
I was accused of inciting violence and denied the ability to seek outside employment because although I was unpaid, I was still technically considered an FBI employee.
I sought outside employment.
I was offered an opportunity with the Center for Renewing America, Russ Votes crew up in D.C.
They offered me a fellowship.
The FBI denied that and tried to deny me an income.
And at the end, I resigned just before testifying in a transcribed interview for the weaponization committee.
And we'll have the opportunity to actually speak publicly this week on Thursday for the weaponization.
So lots of questions, and thank you for your bravery and your courage.
What specifically were you bringing to your direct supervisor that started this chain of events?
Well, the FBI has a rulebook.
It's called the DIAOG, the Domestic Investigations Operations Guide, and it spells out how you're supposed to bring investigations forward.
I was very familiar with it.
I'd opened about 200 cases in the years before getting reassigned to January 6th.
And what's going on with January 6th is it should be one case run out of Washington, D.C., but instead, the FBI has elected to open a separate case for every single person who may or may not be a subject that day.
And instead of on paper running them from Washington, D.C., they are spreading those cases around the country to all the field offices if the person happens to reside in that area.
And that is creating this false illusion that domestic terrorism is on the rise in Sacramento and Cleveland and Milwaukee and Miami, when in fact all of those numbers are justified by the January 6th investigation, which for most people actually isn't a terrorism investigation.
It's a criminal trespass.
So what you're saying, so for example, just an immediate reaction: if Christopher Wray were to testify in front of the Senate and he'd say, you know, currently we have 1,900 active terrorism investigations in 15 different cities, he's really talking about maybe January 6th in a different way.
Is that correct?
Precisely.
And you undersold it.
He told the House last week that there's 2,700 cases.
Okay.
But now, how many of those are January 6th related?
Just be at a ballpark.
Well, I mean, just ballpark area.
They've already charged 1,000 people, and I was told that they were going to be charging another 1,000.
They're going to extend the restricted area to outside the actual four walls of the Capitol to anybody that was standing on the lawn.
They're just going to keep this going.
And the most disgusting thing that nobody knows about and that I'm hoping to bring forward in this hearing is this is tied to compensation for senior executives within the FBI.
Are there bonuses for how many people you put in prison?
They predetermine their metrics before the fiscal year begins.
And obviously, in this country, the demand for domestic terrorism now vastly outstrips the supply.
So they're having a really hard time meeting those numbers.
And this is the same thing.
I'm sorry, I have to interrupt.
What do you mean they preset their metrics?
This is not selling aluminum siting.
These are lives they put in prison.
What do you mean by that?
That's exactly what I mean.
It's called integrated program management.
It's a very McKinsey-esque consulting process that was brought about about 10 years ago.
And wouldn't you know it, the terrorism statistics for the FBI have quadrupled in the last 10 years because they are trying to meet those numbers.
And meeting them is always a challenge.
But this is a five-year gift, essentially, until the statute runs up where executives are going to get their compensation.
People are going to be able to claim that they are involved with the most important, sophisticated investigation of the history of the Department of Justice and promote out of there.
And as a result, it's now just destroyed so many lives.
Wait, so let's say that XYZ person out of the Denver field office doesn't hit their domestic terrorism white supremacy quota.
What happens then?
I can't ever recall a time where they didn't hit the numbers because the pressure brought to bear and to generate fake numbers.
And January 6th is the most egregious example, but that's just one example.
I know of other instances where, you know, hey, we have a case with four subjects.
Well, instead of one case with four, we'll open four with one.
I was told and pressured that I needed to open an ISIS investigation on an individual who had no connection to ISIS because my division didn't have an ISIS case.
Oh, because you have to justify the operation.
Okay, so here you are.
You go to your direct superior, your supervisor, you basically say the diag, is that correct?
D-I-O-G-OK.
Is not being followed.
Now, the DIOG are internal FBI protocols that have been implemented, but also agreed to with the checks and balances of Congress over rules of the road that when they get watchdogs, these are supposed to be followed.
You're saying that for January 6th, they're not being followed basically at all.
That's right.
They're not being followed because while they can, by black letter law, those rules, they can open up a separate case if they want and spread it around if they want.
Once that decision is made, the agents and the task force officers and the various field offices have responsibility for working those cases, but that's not what's going on.
They're being run out of Washington, D.C., unofficially.
And we were getting directives in my office in Daytona Beach from Washington on how to perform our own cases.
And at the time, I brought my concern forward because I was very experienced in criminal investigations.
And I thought, look, if these cases are righteous and I want to win at trial, we're going to lose.
And I said to my boss, look, we have to disclose this information to the defense.
This is exculpatory information that we've departed.
And I'm worried that we're going to lose.
And I don't want that to happen.
But obviously, they know that the due process is not really a concern out of that Washington, D.C. district.
Do you know of instances where the FBI was knowingly not withholding evidence that could have been exculpatory for the defendant?
Well, it's my contention that on every single January 6th case, and I was hoping that the defense attorneys would get access to my whistleblower complaint, which is public, that that's information that should be brought to a jury to consider the fact that there is compensation tied to these cases.
I think a defense attorney should be able to put the agent on the stand and say, Agent, did your boss get a bonus because you opened this case up?
Yeah, I mean, yeah, these are incentives to try to get more Americans into jail.
I hope everyone is tracking this.
It's unbelievable.
So I want to ask you, how old are you, Steve?
And I'm asking for a reason.
How long have you been?
How long were you in the Bureau?
Just about nine years.
I'm 37.
Okay, got it.
So I'm asking, in the last couple of years, and I don't know the answer to this, has there been a more radical type agent that you've started to work with versus some of the kind of 30, 40, or 50 year olds that have been around for 20 years?
Or are they radical as well?
Is the actual individual agent, the rank and file, changing within the FBI at all?
I think it is, but what you have to understand is the environment in the FBI is not really consistent across the board.
You have the headquarters, very political dominion, and then you go out to the field offices, all the headquarters cities, and those can also be very political because the leaders are managers, they're not really leaders who run those offices go back and forth to headquarters in Washington so often.
And then you have the rank and file agents who are just, like myself, just want to keep their head down and work their cases.
And those tend to be your cops.
Those are the ones who want to put the bad guys in jail.
But unfortunately, at least even in my time in the FBI, the hiring practices were altered.
They've reduced physical fitness standards.
They've gone out and tried out of their way to recruit intersectional candidates to take positions.
And to me, it was just been a problem.
It's been a lot of objection from many of the agents because take something like physical fitness.
You don't have to be an Olympic athlete to be an FBI agent, but that's the only test along the way.
And for me, it was a four-year process to get hired.
That's the only test I knew the answers to ahead of time.
And that sort of indicated a character quality of somebody who was willing to put goals forward and achieve those goals.
But now that's not being met, and they're just really looking for people who are willing to go along to get along, to reach that GS-13 salary, make $130,000, and don't rock the boat.
About 40 seconds remaining, I have to ask this in this segment.
What does the FBI fear?
They fear being embarrassed very much, which is why three weeks ago they asked me, instructed me to redact multiple portions of the book that I'm coming out with next month, because at the end of the day, they're just incredibly embarrassing segments of that book.
So they do, that's interesting because the appearance that we patriots get is that nothing phases them.
But I want to dive into that.
You're saying that there is a fragility to them, that there is a weak spot of public shame and humiliation.
Now that I know that, I know that we do good work on this program then towards that righteous cause.
Stephen Friend, the book is True Blue.
You guys should buy it for no other reason than out of just, you know, gratitude for his courage.
My goodness, we've been saying, where are the FBI agents?
Well, here's one.
Buy the book, True Blue by Stephen Friend.
Very, very important book about how we are living in an open-air police state called the United States of America, where there are incentives, bonuses, quotas to try to get patriots in jail.
Literally, that's your taxpayer-funded government.
Can you just tell us about some of the intimidation that you've been receiving now that you're speaking out?
Well, the FBI told me three weeks ago they wanted me to redact the portions of the book.
There were threats in there about being out of policy, which doesn't really apply to me because I no longer work for them.
But in my meetings with the security division, I was told that I may have committed felonies and that I had incited violence by writing op-eds in which I said it was a rhetorical call to arms to obey your oath of office.
And my wife mysteriously lost her job a few weeks after my suspension.
So it's extended pretty greatly.
But I am going on offense and fighting back by just bringing this information forward to as many people as I can.
They're going to try to put you on a metaphorical show trial.
We have your back, and you know a lot, and I want to keep diving into that.
There is a lot of curiosity in our audience about who's actually in the FBI and why more people don't speak out.
And the answer is because not everyone has the courage that you have to speak out.
They will try to crush you, silence you, smear, slander, come after you.
The FBI fears humiliation.
What do you mean by that?
It's all about protecting the shield at all cost for them.
The image to them means everything.
And it's effective because I can't tell you the number of times I could just pick up a phone call and say I was an FBI agent and people would give me very personal information just based on the fact that they'd seen that badge on TV and in movies and it had such a great reputation.
So anything to tarnish that reputation, I think, is a grave threat to them.
And it also exposes how their Promotion process where it's in fact elevating people who are not qualified as leaders to rise to the ranks and are just ignorant to the facts on the ground, have very little experience actually carrying investigations forward.
That's some of the information that I'm bringing out, and they do not want that brought forward because being labeled competent is probably the most important thing to them.
Yeah, and it's just interesting.
I mean, do they fear funding cuts?
I mean, to protect the shield that I'll cause, I mean, I get the sense that they are a paranoid bunch, that they're afraid that some of their clandestine activities might actually one day come to the surface.
They don't seem as if they're not acting innocent because I think deep down they might know they're doing something wrong.
Any thoughts on that?
There's no question that it's become a weaponized agency.
And I think underneath the leadership of Christopher Wray, he's kind of brought that to its total fulfillment.
I made the point over the weekend at an event that he gave up a $9 million a year job to become the director of the FBI.
It's a 10-year appointment.
It means simple math, the man gave $90 million towards the cause.
That's what ideological conviction looks like.
And that's why he can stand in a senatorial hearing and say, I got a plane to catch Senator and walk out.
But now with the House being in the hands of the Republicans and they have the appropriations ability, I'm hoping that they're going to leverage that and really get some results done.
And most recently, the FBI refusing to cooperate with the source report documents about President Biden.
Why not just say, hey, look, we're not going to raise the debt ceiling until you give us that information.
When you were working at the FBI, when the Peter Strzzok and Lisa Page scandal hit, was there conversation about that?
Whistleblowers Standing Their Ground00:03:06
Was there kind of, did you see other chatter amongst agents like that?
I mean, were people even aware of Andy McCabe and Comey when you were there, of that kind of behavior?
Was that kind of water cooler chat?
I'm just curious.
It was kept kind of his arm's length.
That's headquarters, the viper's nest.
That doesn't affect our day-to-day.
But just based on reputation alone, I know that Andy McCabe was just kind of a, they used to say any old Andy will do in New York City where he worked.
And Director Comey, when he came in, he brought this legitimate, ethical, beyond all reproach mentality that has now permeated throughout the leadership class.
And the people that came up to the ranks, the people that came up are still in positions of leadership within the FBI, and they don't think that their judgments can be questioned.
What percentage of current agents would you say view things the way you do, that find it to be improper or wrong?
What percentage of agents do you think would want to speak out if they were protected?
I think it's very sizable.
I think that most people join the FBI and take the oath of office, or at least I'm hopeful.
I kind of almost choked up when I took my oath of office because I knew what that meant.
And I hoped that the vetting process was going to bring people in that sort of felt the same way I did.
I think that too many people are worried about paying the bills.
They're beholden to that paycheck.
And they're worried about being steamrolled by the agency.
But hopefully, the weaponization committee can elevate the whistleblowers and show us the protection that the law is supposed to provide us so that the people in a position that know the information can bring it forward to Chairman Jordan and to Chairman Comer.
The book is True Blue by Stephen Friend: My Journey from Beat Cop to Suspended FBI Whistleblower, and he's testifying this Thursday.
I am looking forward to that testimony very much.
Stephen, thank you so much.
Thank you.
God bless.
Email is freedom at charliekirk.com.
That takes a lot of courage, a lot of bravery.
They're going to come after him with everything they have.
A defector, remember, the regime hates defectors, right?
This is why they had to go after Elon.
They go after Trump.
If you are part of their circle and then you speak out against them, look, whistleblowers, like Stephen right there, are one of the last bulwarks against tyranny.
It's one of the last pressure release valves.
People coming out and saying, no, no, no, I was in the agency and I saw them targeting Americans.
I saw them breaking the rules.
I saw them with an ideological agenda.
We need more and more whistleblowers and we need these whistleblower protections.
It's interesting that he says the FBI is fearful of humiliation.
That's good to know, isn't it?
Everybody fears something.
I fear God.
The FBI doesn't fear God.
They think they are God.
But they fear humiliation.
Maybe we need to make a bigger point of that.
Thanks so much for listening.
Everybody, email us 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.