A Debt Ceiling Civil War? with Steve Bannon and Sen. Mike Lee
The House is about to vote on its major debt ceiling deal — and many prominent Republicans are furious. Could the deal have had more concessions in it...and is getting more concessions worth breaching the debt ceiling? Steve Bannon joins Charlie to explain why he sees the debt deal as one of the worst legislative disasters since Obamacare. Sen. Mike Lee gives the perspective of Senate conservatives.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
|
Time
Text
The Debt Ceiling Crisis00:08:49
Hey everybody, it's on the Charlie Kirk Show.
Steve Bannon starts the show off.
What's going on with the debt ceiling?
What are the action items?
Then we have Senator Mike Lee to explain the Senate perspective on the bill.
Email us your thoughts as always freedom at charliekirk.com and get involved with TurningPointUSA at tpusa.com.
Start a high school or college chapter today at tpusa.com.
That is tpusa.com.
Support the Charlie Kirk show, charliekirk.com slash support and get involved and come to our Young Women's Leadership Summit next week in Dallas, tpusa.com slash YWLS.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
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.
That's why we are here.
Brought to you by the Loan Experts I Trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at AndrewandTodd.com.
Incredibly consequential day, stacked with expert guests.
Joining us now is Steve Bannon.
Steve, great show today.
Let's get right into it.
What are you hearing?
Where do we stand?
What is the latest?
What is the call to action for our audience?
Steve, the floor is yours.
By the way, Charlie Kirk, what a lineup you got today.
You've got some of the most important.
Plus, you've got the Senate.
You segue over to a couple of the big hitters in the Senate where this thing's going to go.
So, look, this is a fight.
This is the most important vote that'll be in this Congress, a defining moment, not just for American conservatism, but for America itself.
To boil it down to its bare essence, they want to take away all the power from the grassroots movement here, the MAGA movement, and just the American people.
Right now, the people are the head of the credits community.
That's why they hate it.
The American people are making decisions about the debt ceiling.
They are uncapping it and giving it two years, two years with no limits.
We could have four or five, $6 trillion in deficits, added directly to the debt ceiling and be in an economic firestorm.
And that's what the Republican, this locks in all the programs of Biden.
The 1.5 to 2.1 trillion that you're hearing on Fox all the time from CBO is a tissue of lies.
It's all false.
And I can point you to Nancy Mace's Twitter feed.
I mean, people who are not considered ultra-maga extremists, people are not in the House Freedom Caucus.
Many of the rising stars that have had McCarthy's blessing heretofore, the Wesley Hunts, the Byron Donalds, the Nancy Maces, they're all coming out and they're eviscerating this because they understand it's not sellable.
This is an unlimited, this locks in all of Biden's radical plans.
It is uncapped.
Two years.
And most importantly, it takes the power.
The numbers are so powerful.
CNN's showing you as more people understand how the system works, as more people understand how they run these deficits, have the Federal Reserve funded by printing money, and the rest of the world's revolting against that.
That is how you overthrow the ruling class in this country.
And they are doing a, this is their redoubt.
And so they don't want it to be one year.
The first bill had one year.
So next May, we would have a national conversation during a presidential election.
The first time in history, we'd have a national conversation about the finances of the country, about this orgy of spending, about our balance sheet, about interest rates, about the Federal Reserve.
It would all be there.
We would actually have a discussion of why we have gone from a republic now to an empire and have a deep, meaningful discussion with the left, with the centrists, and with the right, what this country needs from the people talking about it, not the media puppets, not the uniparty, not the ruling class, not the lords of Wall Street, not the tech oligarchs in Silicon Valley.
The American people having a frank, detailed, and quite frankly intense conversation at the beginning of a presidential election, the entire presidential campaign would be no, they do not want that.
So they kick it what they've always do.
They kick it past the election into 2025.
More than anything, this shows that they have complete and total contempt for you, for your intelligence.
They think you're a group of morons.
They think you're just going to listen to watch Fox News and have their drivel out there about this historic, we're bending the curve.
This is the first time it's been less than a year before.
Those are all lies, demonstrable lies.
And don't take it from me.
There are now dozens of reports up there from Heritage, from Club for Growth, from Freedom Works, from Nancy Mace, from Byron Donalds, people who would not be normally allies of the war room.
Take it from them, read it from them.
And what everybody should do, because this is what they fear, you should get on the phone, and particularly if you're in a Red District, you should tell your congressman and said, look, let me just cut to the chase.
Very simple.
If you vote yes for this, I will put my shoulder to the wheel because the first issue I have to deal with is you.
I will make sure that you're primaried.
I will make sure you lose.
And I will make sure that you're signing your political death warrant today when you vote yes on this.
I hate to be so brutally frank about that, but this is power politics, and this is where we are.
So, Steve, one of the points of confusion we're receiving is Thomas Massey, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan.
Can you help me understand and add some clarity?
Why is Thomas Massey superfiscal hawk and Marjorie Taylor Greene, people we really respect, voicing support for this bill?
Steve, what are we missing?
I don't think you're missing anything.
I think, look, people have made their own decisions.
Congressman Massey, like he said last night, as an engineer, he wanted to, you know, as a politician, he wanted to vote against it, but the engineer in him took over, and that's what he voted.
I think people are very disappointed in that.
You know, Congressman Massey's a little idiosyncratic, and I think people have to deal with that.
But more importantly than Massey, we got retraded on the deal.
The deal at the beginning that they signed off on to have McCarthy as leader, it had to have unanimity, unanimity coming out of the rules committee.
You had to, you had Coleman, or you had Ralph Norman, and you had Chip Roy, who renosed that was supposed to be able to carry it.
There was always, it had to be unanimity among the Republicans.
This was a bait and switch by, because they just suspended the deal they had made because they must do this.
This is the uniparty.
This is the cartel.
They need that money, federal money spent at the $7 trillion level for the budgets like mother's milk.
They don't exist without it.
And they understand that the American people are standing in front of them.
So they just, they retraded the deal.
Massey was terrible, but more terrible, worse than that is what they retraded the deal.
Now you're going to have debate on that this afternoon in a general vote.
This is a power move.
We are fighting a spiritual war, but the spiritual war often manifests itself in concrete actions.
And that's where we are.
This is a defining moment in American, modern American political history because we scraped through and got a, we won 10 or 12 seats pickup.
We have a five-seat majority.
And from day one of this Congress, this audience, your audience, the populist nationalist MAGA, have exerted tremendous influence, and they hate that every second of the day.
And so now they have come out with this tissue of lies.
Yes.
You have had certain people that are supposedly MAGA in the House Freedom Caucus that are out there trying to hawk the spin.
Everybody's going to have to weigh and measure that.
So there'll be plenty of time for accountability after that.
But I will say this, and particularly for the House Freedom Caucus people and people in red districts, the citizens should weigh and measure it and make your own decision.
I'm not here to tell you what to do.
You should make your own decisions.
But I believe, particularly in red districts, that where the primary is the general, that if they vote yes, they've decided.
They've told you what they think of you.
They think you're a moron.
They think you will believe this tissue of lies.
There's not one penny.
If they believed of the 1.5 trillion to 2.1 trillion, what CBO and all these things are spending, if they believed that there was a penny, not a dollar, not $10, if they believed it was a penny of real savings, of real cuts, they would put a number in the cap.
They would be very comfortable with that.
They picked some number.
It has no cap for a reason.
They understand this is going to be a death spiral and the debt is going to be raised.
And you say, well, why would they do that, Steve?
National Security and Spending00:07:11
Why would they do it against a country?
Because the lobbyist apparatus, what we call the swamp or the cartel, it feeds off of this spending of the federal government.
Why do you think of the nine richest counties in this nation?
That's right.
Seven of them, seven of them are in Washington, D.C., Northern Virginia, and Maryland.
That's right.
Seven of the nine wealthy.
What does this make of Silicon Valley and New York?
We got the global financial capital up in New York.
We got the manufacturing up in Detroit.
We got the Silicon Valley.
We got the greatest source of value in this nation's history and mankind's history out in Silicon Valley.
You got new things in Austin, Texas, and in Phoenix all over Denver.
You got them sprouting up all Miami.
Why the seven of the nine in Washington, D.C.?
Because they get now a $7 trillion private equity fund every year.
And by this vote today, you're giving them a free runway.
That's right.
If they believed in anything, they would put a cap on it.
If they believed in anything, they would say, yes, let's just do it for a year.
And next year, let's have another debate of how it went, of how it went.
By the way, we didn't love the first deal, but we said, hey, it's a $1.5 trillion.
We don't want to increase it at all, but we'll do it to $1.5 trillion, right?
Because they say that should be the year.
And next year, whatever comes first.
It would be the railhead of a presidential election.
They saw the CNN numbers.
60% of the American people said no increase unless massive cuts.
45% of Democrats said that.
As people find out more about this, you can't continue to do this.
You've got to have cuts, real cuts, not ephemeral, phony, fake cuts.
So this is where we are.
That's why it's a hard no.
The Warhawks, the neocons that were unwilling to come to the table and budge at all to the sacred cow of the defense budget, which looks more and more as the invade other countries budget.
I want to talk about relieffactor.com.
I want you guys to check out relieffactor.com, 100% drug-free, knee pain, back pain, joint pain, elbow pain.
Check out Relief Factor Energy, help makes your body make nutrients readily available.
Relief Factor Sleep.
I know a lot of you are probably having trouble sleeping.
Relief Factor Sleep could be the best solution for you.
Everybody goes to bed.
Not everybody sleeps.
We're all about helping people live lives that are filled with connection, exploration, passion, and emotion.
That is what his life is all about.
Make sure you guys are sleeping well.
It's a major part of life.
Check it out right now: relieffactor.com, relieffactor.com.
Reports show us that Lindsey Graham was fired up throughout all these negotiations demanding increases to the military budget.
It's conceivable that we could have got an even better, you know, better deal, domestic spending, all that stuff, if we were willing to actually play ball on the defense budget.
Steve, we're not negotiating in good faith.
If we're not willing to actually talk about why do we have military bases in Peru, in Somalia, in every part of the world.
Steve, can you mention this?
Because the UNIPA has certain sacrosanct third rail sacred cows you're not allowed to touch, including the Department of Offense, less actually the Department of Defense.
Your thoughts, Steve Bannon.
Well, you know, as a veteran, and I take this very seriously, the defense budget is out of control.
We have to rethink the entire way that we conduct not just foreign policy, but national security.
We have to get off of this everything focused on kinetic war.
We have to start to think of the unrestricted warfare that the Chinese Communist Party is at war with us.
That's information warfare, cyber warfare, and particularly economic warfare.
We can bring down the existential threat, the greatest existential threat we have besides, as President Trump would say, the administrative and deep state here in our own nation, the Leviathan, the Chinese Communist Party.
I can do that.
And I've had experts on the show in six months cutting off from capital and technology in the United States, our market, our capital markets, and a technology.
The CC, Lao Beijing overthrows them.
We can't continue on.
I think the defense budget in this bill is going to be $900 billion.
And essentially, that's a lie.
That's a lie.
Because when you look at the real, all of it from the different departments, over a trillion dollars today, we cannot have a trillion-dollar defense budget.
We can't do it.
We've got to go in and start to think this through.
And this is, in a sense, that we know we have to win the war against Taiwan in Taiwan to defend Taiwan and the chip factories against the CCP, whether we like it or not.
But this has to be a totally rethinking.
This has got to be America first.
And the defense budget, I say this as a hawk, but not a neocon, that we must rethink the defense budget.
And that should be the first thing on the table to actually have meaningful, smart cuts on where we don't do.
And the profits of the war profiteers at the defense industry is absolutely incredible and unsatisfactory.
And Steve, but bigger than every one of those geopolitical threats that Lindsey Graham wants us to believe in, oh, Putin's going to invade Newark, New Jersey tomorrow, is our debt.
The debt is a national security crisis.
The national debt is the true threat to our sovereignty.
I mean, we have existential threats to our sovereignty, 10,000 people coming across the border, but the spending discipline, if you want to actually defend the nation, then get some fiscal sanity and spending discipline.
Steve Bennett.
Unrestricted warfare is the manual printed in the late 90s by the two brilliant Chinese communist colonels in the PLA that walked through the entire war against the West.
And central to that is economic warfare.
The national debt, the interest payments upon it, and plus the low productivity, what this is going to do is not simply the debt and the crowding out effect of having to finance these borrowings.
It's the fact of, has your nation gotten any better?
Have you seen the use of proceeds that go into new railroads, that going to new airports, that go into new infrastructure?
No.
It's all to play essentially operating income.
They talk about investments.
It's not.
It's just the way that the system works to spread this money out to everybody and to have phony economic growth, not real productivity economic growth based upon free market capitalism.
This is the debt and the system that leads you to the debt is one of the most, if not the most significant national security.
Look at this.
All of our allies, including all the third world, is running away from us, including the Saudis.
The Saudis just, yeah, they said they want to be part of the BRICS, which is that kind of developing nations, you know, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, now Saudi Arabia and others, because they said, hey, we control the national resources and we do everything in dollars and you're devaluing this as we go.
We see what you're doing.
We see these budget deficits.
Maybe the American people can't stop it, but we're going to stop it for our people.
We're going to get off the dollar.
We're going to get gold back.
We're going to get gold back and we're going to have our resources.
This is the most significant national security threat to our nation.
Steve, it's time for the Republican Party to be the party of spending discipline.
And the base is demanding it.
The grassroots is demanding it.
And in some ways, look, both parties created this mess.
But this audience right now, you know, the war room posse, the people that watch us here on Real America's Voice, they're balancing their budgets.
Fighting Back Against Woke Culture00:03:15
They keep their credit card debt under control.
They're not spending with reckless abandon.
And there is an asymmetry.
There is a disharmony.
There is a disconnect between the working man and woman, their virtue, their principle, their integrity, and the lack thereof of the people in D.C. Ruling class has taken out a second mortgage on you.
You owe $250,000, all of you, and your families.
They've taken out a second mortgage under your name, and you're paying for it in taxes and lost productivity and growth in the American economy.
Think about that.
Steve Bannon, thank you so much.
And you got a show this afternoon, 5 p.m. Easter.
I know you're going to be hitting it hard.
Thanks so much, Steve.
All right, I got an important thing to share with you.
You were probably tired about all these left-wing progressive companies.
And you're probably exhausted with trying to keep up with all their virtue signaling and their woke nonsense.
It's a question, right?
Why has corporate America decided to say we hate you to their customers?
I mean, I see Adidas.
Adidas might as well have a big sign that says, we hate you.
Look, progressive left-wing companies are taking over the market, and it's time for us to fight back.
I want to tell you about a company I really care about, run by a friend of mine who's a great American, and they're growing, and they need your help, and it's very important, okay?
Look, we don't have to fund these companies, the left-wing companies.
We finally have an alternative, public square.
We have a solution.
I hear from people all the time, Charlie, how do we fight back?
Charlie, where are the options?
It's very simple.
It's publicsq.com.
Join the movement of millions of patriotic Americans who love truth, our country, and our Constitution at publicsq.com.
I use this app all the time when I'm traveling and also my local neighborhood.
It's an app and a website where you can get connected to tens of thousands of businesses from all different industries that share your values like life, family, and freedom.
Michael, who runs Public Square, does a fabulous job, and it's free to join as a consumer or a business owner.
And you can get started today at publicsq.com.
Download the app now.
That's publicsq.com.
How are we going to fight woke capital?
How are we going to fight these progressive companies?
How are public square?
They do a fabulous job.
I think the world of them, they're in the arena fighting back.
If you are a business owner, download the app.
If you are interested in supporting companies that aren't woke, download the app.
If you are traveling, you want to find a coffee shop that is not woke, download the app or go to publicsq.com.
I'm 100% behind them.
You're going to hear me talk about them a lot.
It's time for us to join forces and build the parallel economy.
Free to join, especially if you're a business owner.
Go to publicsq.com.
Joining us now is one of my favorite senators, and I can tell you he's a man of integrity, and he's really been special, and I'm honored to call him a friend.
Senator Mike Lee.
Senator, welcome back to the program.
Thanks so much, Charlie.
Senator Lee's Opposition00:11:04
Good to be with you.
So, Senator, all the focus has been on the House.
Everyone's talking about McCarthy v. Biden, McCarthy v. But we have to remember there's an upper chamber, and it really hasn't received that much attention or involvement, which I find to be interesting because you still need a 60-vote threshold, from what I understand, to raise the debt ceiling.
Maybe that's changed because of Senate rules.
So, Senator, how do you stand on this debt ceiling bill?
And more broadly, how do your colleagues stand?
Charlie, this was a big missed opportunity.
Now, I'm not going to refer to it yet in the past tense.
It hasn't passed.
There's still time, still time for Americans to demand something better and for Republicans to stand for what they promised they would stand for if given the chance to lead.
But this was a series of missed opportunities followed up by a series of badly communicated errors.
In other words, they failed to negotiate even a small fraction of what we promised to deliver.
And having so failed, they've then repackaged this in a form that they're presenting to the American people as doing things that it doesn't do.
It claims to save a whole lot of money.
It doesn't.
We're talking $6 to $12 billion TOPS is what it actually saves.
It claims to bring about a regulatory overhaul.
What we needed was the Reigns Act to restore the constitutional framework put in place by Article 1.
Instead, what we got was a regulatory pay-as-you-go measure.
A couple of problems with that.
Number one, it didn't solve the underlying problem, the unconstitutionality of executive branch agencies passing laws without the assent of the American people's elected representatives.
But it also contains a provision that renders it all moot.
It contains a provision, Section 265 of the bill says that the Biden OMB director has complete discretion to decide not to comply.
So time after time, when I see something promised in the bill to the American people, when I read the actual text, some annoying habit that I have, it doesn't do what it claims to do.
And I find that really disconcerting.
So, Senator, I want to just read some of the talking points that Jim Jordan and Thomas Massey and others, people that you and I really respect, are saying.
They're saying that this puts the IRS agent funding in suspension.
They're saying this is a $2 trillion cut.
Senator, some of this is kind of Washington, D.C. spending news speak.
And again, I'm not a legislative expert with this stuff.
There's some things that I would consider myself to be an expert on, such as debating left-wingers on critical race theory, Marxism.
Some of this stuff is unclear.
Is it a cut, Senator, or is it a slowdown in the rate of growth?
Just educate our audience in how the rules of spending gravity are in perpetual suspense when it comes to D.C. budgeting.
It's probably best described as an aspirational goal to increase the rate of spending less rapidly than it might otherwise expand.
And that really isn't enough.
You know, one of the things that I look for in a deal like this is what does it do in year one?
What does it do right off the bat?
Because that makes a big difference.
Very often, promises of cuts in the out years, in future years over the 10-year budgetary window, don't materialize.
This is the oldest trick in the book.
So one of the first things that I look to is what does it do in year one?
Well, in year one, it takes FY 2023 discretionary spending, the highest it's ever been in the history of our republic.
And it sets that as the baseline for the next fiscal year.
That by itself isn't a savings.
As far as the future caps that they have in mind, those are largely unenforceable, especially after we get outside of the first two years.
Those are things that Congress could choose to ignore without any consequence and without any difficulty at all.
So as far as I can tell, the only thing that this saves involves some of the clawbacks of these unspent COVID funds.
We're talking somewhere in the range of $6 to $12 billion.
By contrast, the limit, save, grow bill that was passed by the House about a month ago, which wasn't perfect, but I applauded it and was ready to vote for it eagerly, that would have saved us in year one alone something along the order of a trillion dollars,
well over a trillion dollars if you take into account the cost savings from the Green New Deal-styled tax credits that were put in place in the Inflation Reduction Act and in the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
All we had to do was pass that.
We would have achieved somewhere along the order of $1 trillion in year one.
Instead, we're left with something that maybe saves $6 to $12 billion.
That's not enough, not even nearly enough.
So, Senator, I mentioned this in the opening, and I'm curious.
It is 60 votes, is that right, to pass the procedural?
It's still 60 votes.
It takes 60 votes.
And so what that means is you've got to have not only every single Democrat, and think about how sad this is, by the way.
We had every or nearly every Republican in the Senate ready to vote for limit, save, grow.
And if we had focused on that and said that was the deal, that was on the table, something like that at least, we could have forced the Democrats to produce the additional 11, 12, 13 votes to get over the threshold.
And instead, we start from a premise, which is always where we seem to get when we have a badly negotiated deal, where we start with the premise that all 51 Democrats in the Senate are, of course, going to be for this, because why wouldn't they be?
It's a great deal for them.
It suspends the debt ceiling altogether, and it's going to end up costing us about $4 trillion in new debt.
So 51 Democrats right off the bat.
That means all they have to do is get nine Republicans to join with the 51 Democrats.
If they can get at least nine, this thing gets done.
But remember, Republicans could stop this.
And this is why I wrote a letter a few weeks ago.
It was signed by 43 Republicans in the Senate saying that we would oppose cloture.
That is, we would stop them on the 60-vote threshold vote if they tried to raise the debt ceiling with anything that didn't bring about substantive spending and budgetary reforms.
Now, I believe this doesn't satisfy that, and it's one of the reasons why I plan to oppose this.
I'm going to propose amendments, trying to improve it, try to make it better.
Assuming that we're not able to make it better, I will oppose it, and I hope that my Republican colleagues will as well.
So, I mean, just speculation, do you anticipate it passing the Senate just based on kind of a, let's just say, walkthrough of the chatter in the hallway?
Yeah, my gut sense at this point, based on chatter in the hallway, is that it's likely going to pass.
But there's a lot that has to happen between now and when those votes occur in the Senate.
It's going to have to withstand some amendment votes.
And if not, we're going to draw out the time to a degree that my colleagues aren't going to like.
But once we get through those amendment votes, the picture might look a little bit different, especially as people continue to hear from their constituents who are understandably concerned about this deal.
Look, it takes 41 senators, just 41 senators.
This is why I wrote that letter.
41 senators can block basically any piece of legislation, including this one, if they choose to oppose it.
Republicans can stop this.
We are not victims to the House.
We are not victims to the Democrats here.
We can choose to stop this.
If this passes, it will be because enough Republicans helped the Democrats to get this passed.
Strangely enough, though, the opposition to the bill from the Senate, Senator, is not along the framework that you're articulating.
Senator Lindsey Graham is saying that he wants to oppose it, but he might vote for it because it doesn't spend enough on foreign aid and military adventures abroad.
Senator, I have so much respect for you because you're a realist here and you also believe that waste, fraud, and abuse does not stop immediately just because you're going to go buy a missile or have a $5,000 hammer.
You know, you're a realist at all parts of the budget.
Senator, can you just offer some context with, I know, full respect for your colleagues of how there's a philosophical difference amongst most Republicans that say they do not want to touch the defense budget at all.
And I'm afraid that does a disservice to our message of fiscal discipline when we're not willing to touch the sacred cow of the Department of Defense.
Yeah, first of all, let me say, Charlie, that anyone in the Republican conference or in the Democratic Conference for that matter who has concerns about the bill, I respect that and I want to encourage people taking a skeptical view toward the bill.
So I'm glad to have anyone joining me, even if it's for a different reason than I would propose.
Secondly, I believe that defense is one of the most important things the United States government can do.
It's one of the few things that only we can do and that we must do.
But at the end of the day, our ability to do the few things that only the United States government can do and that we have to do is impaired when we take on too many other responsibilities that don't have anything to do with what the United States government is supposed to do.
So if we really want to get a handle on this, we need to control spending.
We need to control it everywhere.
And if we don't do that, our ability to fund every one of our true priorities, including and especially national defense, which happens to be one of our largest obligations, appropriately so, is diminished.
In just a few years, we could find ourselves spending more on interest on our national debt than we spend on national defense.
That's going to really impair our ability to do everything that needs to be done.
So that's why I would ask all within the sound of my voice, including and especially those concerned about defense spending.
If you want to have money to spend on defense, for the love of this great country, step forward and express your concerns with this bill.
This bill, look, if it did all the things that its lead proponents are claiming that it does, I might well vote for it, but it doesn't.
You've got to read the fine print.
And when you read it, you see it's a whole lot of smoke and a whole lot of mirrors, not a lot of cuts at all.
Senator, you are honest across the board, and our audience appreciates it.
If we are going to be this party of fiscal discipline, then we must be willing to also talk about why do we have military bases in every hemisphere in every country, which, by the way, the failure to cut spending, the failure to balance our budget, is a much bigger national security risk than some third world jungle tribe that might be emerging in Peru.
It's a bigger national security risk that we don't have a strong dollar and that we can't balance our budget.
That right there is an existential risk to our Republic.
Senator, God bless you.
Thank you for your integrity and courage.
Thank you, Charlie.
We'll get back to the debt ceiling stuff.
We got guests, Galore.
We got Citizen Kaine, Senator Scott, the best guests.
Chick-fil-A Under Attack00:05:04
But it's time to talk about Chick-fil-A.
The last couple of years, I've been peppering in some criticism of Chick-fil-A.
But there is a new appetite out there.
This is one of the reasons why the public square app, which all of you should download, is top 10 on the Apple App Store.
It's because all of a sudden there's this hunger, there's this desire, there's this appetite to go hold corporate America accountable.
And I am standing in applause.
Yes, I think it really is the trans thing.
The trans thing has gone so far, it's primal, it's going after kids.
It is far more animating than the race stuff.
Now, the race stuff, I believe, is equally as pernicious, equally as dangerous to the Republic, to our core values, to the promise of the West, than almost anything else out there.
But the race stuff, people get a little uncomfortable with.
So let's go back in time.
10 years ago, 11 years ago, actually, in the summer of 2012, I remember it vividly, Chick-fil-A was attacked by the left for not coming out in favor of gay marriage.
Mike Huckabee and others, the great Mike Huckabee, did a pro-Chick-fil-A day of support.
I remember going to the Chick-fil-A in Schaumburg, Illinois, and standing in line amongst fellow patriots.
And we bought our food and all as a show of solidarity to try to say, you know what, Chick-fil-A is one of us.
They refused to go along with the alphabet mafia pride stuff, and that was 10 years ago.
And Chick-fil-A was criticized when they opened a store in downtown Manhattan as being a hate group.
And so that was always there.
There was always this, we don't like you attitude of the mainstream press towards Chick-fil-A.
And unfortunately, it got to Chick-fil-A leadership.
It was starting to damage them.
Look, Chick-fil-A is a Christian company.
I'm not here to question the faith of Dan Cathy.
I'm not here to question the faith of the people that run Chick-fil-A.
By all accounts, I'm told that they are dutiful Christians and they believe in the Bible and praise God for that.
But I think they were traumatized to the attacks when they say they stood for traditional marriage, one man, one woman marriage.
And they were looking for an opening and an opportunity to try to regain some likability amongst the secular Marxists.
Now, you could call it naivete, I will not.
You could call it weakness, which I will, but you also could show it the embracing of a serpent ideology, which is DEI.
Now, during Floyd Apalooza, during the summer of 2020, Dan Cathy, the CEO, and I remember this clip, and now it's finally getting attention again, came out with this just repulsive line of reasoning that we as white people must feel shame and humiliation.
And he goes on to shine the shoes of a black man next to him, playing into all the false premises of race politics and sectarianism and tribalism and race essentialism.
Play Cut 33, CEO of Chick-fil-A.
And at that revival on the front seat was an older African-American, young older African-American American man that was sitting there.
And this young man got up that was there in that service, and he'd been so gripped with conviction about the racism that was in that local community, a small town in Texas, that he took a shoebrush and he walked over to this elderly gentleman and he knelt on his knees and he began to shine his shoes.
It was an attitude of conviction.
And so any expressions of a contrite heart, of a sense of humility, a sense of shame, a sense of embarrassment, begin with an apologetic heart.
There's another clip where he actually goes and shines the shoes of a black man.
I do not have time to get into DEI, but right now, Chick-fil-A has on their website a diversity, equity, inclusion director.
There is no compromising with this, okay?
Diversity, equity, inclusion is a Marxist, anti-white, anti-Western project.
It started from the college campuses.
It's against Christianity.
It's against the promise of the West.
There is no reconciling it.
It is against scripture itself.
There is no longer Jew or Greek.
There is no longer slave or free.
There is no longer male or female.
For all are one in Christ Jesus.
Galatians 3.28 is very clear.
But here's what is most disappointing about the Chick-fil-A thing, and why I'm speaking out against it, and I encourage you to as well, is that when I first got into this, when I started Turning Point USA, Chick-fil-A was on our team.
Chick-fil-A was strong, and they were in our corner.
So I hold them to a higher standard than Northface.
I hold them to a standard that you should be in the trenches, not pandering to race politics or DEI or CRT, but rejecting that repulsive ideology.
Disappointing Corporate Silence00:00:23
And it's disappointing beyond words to see a company that was once on our team act like the people we're fighting.
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.