Has NATO Outlived Its Purpose? with Vivek Ramaswamy and David Bahnsen
Should political expression be a protected right? How can we both end the Ukraine war and pry Russia away from China? Should we end NATO and replace it with a new anti-China alliance? Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy joins to talk about all that and more. Plus, finance expert David Bahnsen explains the financial and economic ramifications from America's near-breach of the debt ceiling.Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Fiscal Irresponsibility and Debt Defaults00:09:32
Hey everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk show, we have Dave Bonson who talks about the debt ceiling bill and our fiscal irresponsibility that is plaguing our nation.
Then we have Avek Ramaswamy running for president.
We talk about his plan for Ukraine and also what is he going to do differently to revive the promise of America.
Email me as always freedom at charliekirk.com.
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Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
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Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
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There are a lot of questions about this debt bill and just all the economic impacts.
No better guest to help us navigate it than Dave Bonson from the Bonson Group.
Dave, welcome to the program and thank you for making time.
I want to read this article here and you can explain it to me.
Debt ceiling prompts Uncle Sam to refill its vast bank account.
And the buried lead in this article, again, this is not my area of expertise.
It says this could cause, whether it will morph into a mere challenge or whether it will make banks to a place of unsustainability.
Basically, they're talking about a mass deluge of treasury bills.
What's going on here, Dave?
Yeah, like a lot of things that come from Axios and other left-wing news publications, it's a pretty economically ignorant proposition.
Essentially, Charlie, they're suggesting that because we went a period of time not adding new debt issuance, that now all of a sudden there will be such a glut of new T-bill purchases that it will overwhelm the markets.
And I think it kind of reflects a lack of understanding of how the bond market works.
The demand that was suppressed because they weren't issuing new bonds was sort of in limbo.
Now all of a sudden there's a lot of new bonds being bought.
Markets fully priced for it.
You can see the stock market hasn't responded.
The bond market volatility is actually lower, not higher.
So I just think it's sort of a distraction from Axios on the real issue underlying what's going on.
So what is your general opinion about the culture of debt that Washington, D.C. has embraced?
What does it mean economically?
Were you impressed with the debt ceiling bill?
Were you underwhelmed with it?
And do you think it actually did what was necessary to address our fiscal issues in our country?
You know, Charlie, one of the things conservatives like you and I believe in is that things have to be compared against something.
We can't compare something against utopia because utopia is a myth.
Nirvana is a fallacy.
And so I don't look at the debt ceiling bill and say, wow, this really addresses everything we need.
$31 trillion of debt and one to two trillion dollar annual deficits are now suddenly rectified because they're most certainly not and it's not even close.
But do I believe compared to some of the alternatives, we made incremental progress?
Well, sure, I do.
But when you say the culture of debt and indebtedness and it coming from Washington, I think my point would be that the culture of indebtedness is sadly coming from the people.
The people say government spends too much money, but then when you go to talk about what you want to cut, nobody seems to want to cut anything.
And I think our government is spending too much, which makes it borrow too much.
And my argument as a conservative against this culture of debt is not merely that we can't afford it.
It's that it comes from a government that is just too large and self-government that is too small.
Yeah.
And everyone wants to be a fiscal hawk until their pet program might be brought into focus.
Like Lindsey Graham talks good game, unless you might have to find some inefficiency about the military industrial complex.
So let me take a step back here and get your opinion because there were a lot of abstractions and threats and people that were not clear because this is going to come up again.
What would have materially occurred if we would have defaulted?
What would that have looked like?
Big deal, not a big deal, or an unknown?
We wouldn't have defaulted.
So that's the biggest issue is there would have been no reason to default on the debt.
That would have been a decision made by the Biden administration, by the Treasury Department, and they wouldn't have made that decision.
So the biggest issue is that we're stuck with an entire process driven by a lie that was more or less exacerbated by the media throughout.
The government has ample cash flows, trillions of dollars of cash flows that come from tax revenue.
The debt service is 8% of federal outlays.
So unless cash flows became over 92% depleted, then we would have continued to be able to service our debt.
Now, if they couldn't borrow new money, they would have had to reprioritize other payments.
That is not, which has happened dozens of times.
I don't like it.
I think it's irresponsible.
I think that we should be paying for the things we committed to, but there would not have been a debt default.
And there was a shameful amount of dishonesty going on in this conversation.
Do you think that dishonesty drove us towards a sense of panic that did not allow us to think clearly about the fiscal cliff that we're driving towards?
Well, look, there's a couple of categories here, Charlie.
I mean, the political side of this traditionally has not gone well for Republicans.
And what Speaker McCarthy did here brilliantly is pass his own bill.
He raised the debt ceiling, and the Biden administration had not raised it.
And he raised it with spending cuts and other forms of what I thought were pretty reasonable expectations.
And so it forced the Biden administration to do what they said they were not going to do, which was negotiate on reasonable and quite small incremental reforms.
The hysteria didn't help, but it was part of the reality.
But Charlie, if I'm being candid, the thing that hurt the most is that we had always raised the debt ceiling as Republicans under the Trump administration.
I agree.
No, the track record and the behavior of Republicans the last couple of decades on spending has been insulting.
And it's both parties.
And I even think people say, oh, COVID, oh, stop it.
There was no reason to spend the way that we needed to during COVID.
You should have opened up the country.
That would have been a far greater stimulus than spending $6 trillion that we don't have.
But what you are talking about here is that, because when I was speaking to lawmakers, again, I'm not an economist, senators were telling me, Charlie, we can't default.
That's the number one thing.
And so it was almost this built-in operating assumption, right?
It was a built-in thing that if we do not raise the debt ceiling by the 1st of June, the dollar will basically be just a piece of paper.
What you're saying is, well, not really.
The market might have gone down a little bit, but we wouldn't have seen kind of apocalypse, is what you're saying.
Right.
And so two things can be true at once.
If the U.S. were to literally default on debt, I think it would be totally inexcusable and catastrophic for financial markets and future financial stability.
But the reason I can say that and not be inconsistent with what I just said is it simply wouldn't have happened.
It was never going to happen.
And so that threat of someone standing in front of a truck when we all knew they were going to move out of the way.
Well, if you ask me, is it a truck hitting someone going to kill them?
The answer is yes.
But yeah, the person's pretty much going to move out of the way.
So we're wasting our time.
Ultimately, though, all of it is very effective at avoiding the real conversation.
I think Speaker McCarthy played the best cards he could.
We got a pretty decent movement on work requirements for food stamps, $20 billion less funding for IRS, some spending freezes.
None of it's going to change the world, but it was better than what we had before that bill.
That's sometimes what politics is.
But ultimately, we need a conversation about the size of government and the funding of government.
And we have $31 trillion of debt that is a weight on future economic growth, and nobody wants to talk about it.
And we will never talk about it if we don't start talking honestly about entitlements, our transfer payment commitments to Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare, Medicaid.
We have to have an honest conversation about these things, period.
Including foreign policy, which is a major anchor of the budget, which Republicans are awful.
Lawfare Operations and Funding00:08:00
They're terrible on some of these uniparty deals.
Tell us about the Dividend Cafe and the things you write there, Dave.
Yeah, dividendcafe.com.
I write a free weekly macroeconomic commentary because I want to talk about public policy.
Because I own my own business, it's a multi-billion dollar wealth firm.
I can talk about whatever I want.
I don't have, I used to be a managing director at Morgan Stanley and I could be censored and canceled.
Now, of course, owning my own firm, Charlie, I can say whatever I want.
So at dividendcafe.com, I like to think we give pretty good investment advice, but the more important part is we're giving perspective and commentary without fear of what others may have to think about it.
So dividendcafe.com is a good source, I think, for a lot of economics juxtaposed with public policy.
Check it out.
Dave, thank you for your commentary.
Very fair and wise, as always.
Thank you so much.
Thanks, Charlie.
Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
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We have been warning about the vanity project for consultants.
I received some information last night.
I promised that I would not say the name, but there is a donor out there, and many of you might be able to guess, that is putting together already the money is set aside, $50 million minimum, $50 million just to go against Donald Trump in the primary.
This is not in public reporting yet, so it's not Steve Cohen who's going to do the Chris Christie thing or some of these other guys.
And I was talking through somebody, and I said, Well, did you challenge that donor about early state infrastructure?
Because this particular person I was talking to is very aware about our ballot harvesting issue, signature verification issue, all this sort of stuff.
And the conversation was, yeah, I mean, talked about Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and this donor who's now going to put $50 million minimum, upwards of $200 million, said, I don't care.
I am not going to spend a dollar on the general election if Donald Trump is the nominee.
We have to do everything we possibly can to defeat him.
Now, this is one donor, one, and this will be made public, I'm sure, at some point, and you'll see what super PAC it goes to and all that.
This person has sent some pretty big checks in the past, so there's definitely some firepower there.
They're putting their money where the mouth is, but you have to just, it flabbergasts me, and it infuriates me.
The Democrats are investing in technology, they're investing in data, they're investing in voter registration, they're investing all across the board.
And one of the biggest donors out there is saying, I don't care about any of that.
On the right, I just want $50 million minimum to go against Donald Trump.
And there are probably at least 15 to 20 other donors that are going to do this.
I need to update something I said about a month ago.
I do believe Donald Trump will win the nomination.
I used the word easily a month ago.
I don't think that is still the case.
I think this is going to be much tougher than I thought.
He's going to rip his opponents to shreds.
He has the people.
He has a track record.
But what I'm seeing right now on the horizon, I see it looming.
And quite honestly, not enough people are talking about it.
I see a massive lawfare operation.
DOJ probably going to file two separate indictments.
The more serious one will be incitement towards insurrection, or Blake can find up the exact criminal code.
They're going to go as high as they can.
Fannie Willis in Georgia.
You already have New York with Alvin Bragg.
You have Gene Carroll and this ridiculous civil lawsuit.
And then he's going to have to go into a primary campaign that is going to have a bunch of one percenters that all have like $100 million super PACs.
Chris Christie is going to have $100 million behind him.
Tim Scott will have $250 million behind him.
Ron DeSantis will have $500 million behind him.
And then Donald Trump is going to have some money.
He'll be able to raise some money.
But then he's going to have the people.
Yeah, this is going to be brutal.
I'm telling you right now, I do believe Donald Trump will win the nomination, but I need to update you things in real time because new information comes in.
You have to always be saying, okay, that was true then.
What is true now?
This thing is going to be an absolute melee.
This will make the Roman Coliseum gladiator games look like rock, paper, scissors.
I'm seeing it in the chatter.
I'm seeing it in the online disgusting back and forth between some Trump influencers.
And I don't like any of it, DeSantis influencers, the whole thing.
It's a bloodbath.
And we have not even yet had a debate.
Are we going to have debates?
We don't know.
But the news I have to share with you with the information I have provided is just one donor, one person, $50 million minimum.
And when asked, hey, can you spend at least 10% of that, 20% of that, on ballot chasing, early state infrastructure, lawsuits to fix some of the stuff that even Professor Clements was talking about on Steve Bannon's program?
No, I don't care about that.
So this is going to be like a Soviet arms race.
Donald Trump is going to have, I don't know the degree of difficulty, but it's going to be, it's going to be a journey.
It's going to require an incredible amount of grit and perseverance and fortitude, of which he will be ultimately successful after, as we talk about the billion-dollar barricade.
But that barricade is already being built.
It's not speculation.
It's not guesswork.
I could tell you on good authority, you're going to start to see this in FEC filings.
You're going to start to see this in 527s and super PACs and 501c4s.
You're going to see this crowing mountain.
Because remember, some of the billionaire class that hates Donald Trump, they're almost three times richer than they were in 2016, 17.
You might not be richer.
You might be in debt, but plutocrats and oligarchs are richer than any other time.
Their wealth has increased because of the cheap money policies, low interest rates.
They care obviously more about Trump personally than actually saving the country.
That is where we are at.
I'm going to keep updating you in real time as we go towards a 2024 apocalypse.
Balance of Nature, changing the world one life at a time.
I try to take care of myself.
I try to eat right.
And I love fruits and vegetables.
I'd rather have them than anything else, but I know I don't get nearly enough.
So I thought, I'll try it for two months and no harm, no foul.
If it doesn't work after that, then let's try it and at least I know.
Within two weeks, I noticed a huge difference in my energy, sleeping better at night, and just energy.
I would get up in the morning and get up, not just sit around.
You guys have got to try this.
You have to try it.
You owe it to yourself to try it.
American Interests vs Global Wars00:14:55
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Joining us now is someone that I am glad is running for the presidency.
I say that even as a Trump supporter.
He is moving the Overton window.
He's doing a great job.
He's been very focused on the issues, and I think he's really starting to gain some traction.
Vivek Ramaswamy.
Vivek, welcome back to the program.
Charlie, good to see you.
Vivek, I want to play a piece of tape here of you in Iowa, PlayCut 52.
This is our moment to ask conservatives as Americans to rise to that occasion and say we're done running from something.
Now we got to start running to something.
What does it actually mean to be an American?
That is what we need to answer in our movement.
What does it mean to be an American?
It means we believe in the individual, the family, the nation, and God, the things that actually made this country what we really are.
Merit and the pursuit of excellence.
That you get ahead in this country, not on the color of your skin, but on the content of your character and your contributions.
That is what it means to be an American.
Vivek, you're ready to unveil a big policy proposal, the top three priorities as a nationalist American, just like George Washington.
Tell us about it.
Well, I am a George Washington America First Conservative, Charlie.
And people forget this about Washington.
He was actually the OG of the America First Movement.
You want to put America first?
We have to rediscover what America is.
So what did he stand for?
He said that we believe in self-governance, that there are three branches of government, not four.
Wanted to declare independence from a foreign autocrat, saying we don't depend on foreign autocrats.
At the same time, he was against foreign entanglements that don't advance the American interest.
And you know what he said?
He said that these are the best ideals that formed a nation in human history.
That's what American exceptionalism is all about, that we believe that.
So, Charlie, I'm going to say I'm thinking ahead to what I want to deliver when I leave office.
Say I'm elected in 2024.
When I leave office in January of 2033, what are the things that I will have accomplished?
What can I pledge to say that I'm actually going to deliver?
I think it's just three simple things.
First is actually shutting down the administrative state itself, making sure that by the time I'm done, we have, yes, three branches of government rather than four.
Second is declaring independence from China, that we are not a nation that relies on a foreign autocrat for our modern way of life.
We will no longer be dependent on our enemy for the shoes on our feet or the phones in our pockets.
And third is reviving civic pride in our country, that actually the citizens of this country will again be proud of actually being a citizen because they have duties that come with citizenship, not just privileges that they inherit.
I think, Charlie, if I'm looking at two terms in January 2033, I don't make false promises.
But if there's a lot else I could do, but the three things I want to deliver: drain the administrative state, shut it down, actually declare independence from China.
And by the way, this includes ending the war in Ukraine and pulling Russia out of China's back.
That's what it's going to take to do that.
And third, actually reviving civic pride in this country by making sure that people don't just automatically even inherit their voting rights, but that they're actually fulfilling their civic duties to know something about the country, to serve the country as a way of earning their civic privileges, including even voting.
That I think will have been a success.
And I'm going to be talking about that more in the campaign trails.
So far, I've given you the high-level vision of national identity.
I'm an unapologetic American nationalist, though.
And what that actually means is reviving what it actually means to be an American.
That's how we're going to do it tangibly.
Vec, today is the 79th anniversary of D-Day.
What can we do legislatively to get that country back?
We're a less free country.
We are celebrating the wrong things.
We have a whole month dedicated to pride and whatever the heck that means in the LGBT mafia running our country.
What can we do actually legislatively?
What can a president do to lead the country back to the greatness that we saw 79 years ago today?
So I think a lot of that falls in that category of reviving civic pride, civic identity, national identity itself.
A lot of this is ending this identitarian vision of identity politics and affirmative action in America.
It was created.
Actually, you don't need legislation to do this one, Charlie.
Affirmative action was created by executive order.
Lyndon Johnson signed it into law by executive order, 11246.
Every president since Johnson could have taken a pen and crossed it out.
None of them has yet had the courage to do it.
One of the first things I can do, day one, end identity politics in this country, saying that, you know what, if you want to do business with the federal government, you no longer have to adopt racial or gender quota systems.
I believe in a civil rights revolution in our century, Charlie, making political expression a civil right, to say that if you're going to actually be unable to fire somebody or deplatform somebody for being black or gay or Muslim or white or Jewish or whatever, that you should not be able to fire somebody or deplatform somebody for expressing their political viewpoints either.
We're going to apply these standards even-handedly without apologizing for it.
And then I think part of this is unshackling ourselves from these constraints that we've applied to ourselves to apologize for who we really are.
Take the climate cult.
That's what it's all about.
The climate cult has nothing to do with the climate.
It has to do with apologizing for our success and who we really are.
And this, too, the president can do by just crossing a line through other presidentially signed regulations that were never passed into law.
I've said we're done measuring carbon emissions.
Why would we measure that instead of actually measuring what affects how Americans live with prosperity here at home?
So that just gives you a taste.
I could probably go on for an hour, Charlie, but those are examples of some of the things that I'm going to plan to get done, many of which don't even require legislation.
It just requires a president with a spine who's actually willing to put this country first.
Domestically, that's what I'm going to do.
And I could be happy to talk to you about, from a foreign policy perspective, how the president could also end the war in Ukraine and start reprioritizing American interests here at home again.
Let's talk about that.
So, as an America first nationalist and the traditional George Washington, who I agree, I think we need more Washington and a lot less of the kind of modern presidential tradition.
Let's talk about Ukraine.
I think Ukraine has been one of the sloppiest projects handled by the federal government.
We shouldn't send a penny over there.
It's a major mistake.
One of the people that is also running for the presidency, I think, is contrast of your views.
I want to play her on CNN, Nikki Haley.
And I want you not just to respond, but also just to show how different your worldview is and how you would approach this.
She is not an America first nationalist.
I think she's running for chairman of the board of Boeing or chairman of the board of Northrop Grumman, definitely not President of the United States.
She said it's in the best interest to give Zelensky whatever he needs, play cut 15.
President Trump has refused to say whether he believes Russia should win the war.
Ron DeSantis referred to Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a quote territorial dispute.
What do you think of that?
I think that that's a mistake that too many have made.
That's exactly what got the Europeans in this position with Russia in the first place.
And for them to sit there and say that this is a territorial dispute, that's just not the case.
To say that we should stay neutral.
It is in the best interest of America.
It's in the best interest of our national security for Ukraine to win.
Vivek, is it in the top priority of our country while we're being invaded by 10,000 people to worry about which thug will control eastern Ukraine?
I have a fundamentally different worldview on this than Nikki Haley.
Frankly, the one thing that the host there got wrong is actually Ron DeSantis' position.
I know he told Tucker that within hours or a few days, he also changed that position.
That's right.
Which shows how powerful the donor interests are in the Republican Party.
And Charlie, I get calls from donors all the time, actually, one of whom disavowed his support for me, publicly previously endorsed me, multi-billionaire Bill Ackman, who actually said that, among other reasons, it was my lack of support for Ukraine that caused him to change his position.
That's fine.
I'm independent on this.
We need to end this war.
And I'm going to tell you, I have actually a vision of how to do it.
I'm going a little further than President Trump here, Charlie, and offering specifics.
And this is going to make a lot of people mad, but made ABC mad when I was on Sunday with them.
Here's how we got to do it: I'm going to make major concessions, yes, to Putin.
I'm going to call that what it is.
We'll freeze the current lines of control.
Not another dime of support goes to Ukraine.
And I'm willing to make a permanent commitment that Ukraine will not join NATO.
I think NATO expansionism has been a disaster.
You're right.
George Kennan, he was the major architect of actually Cold War deterrence against the USSR before he died in the late 90s.
He called NATO expansionism the biggest mistake.
NATO has expanded more after the fall of the USSR than ever it did during the USSR.
But I'm not going to do that for free.
I'm about advancing American interests.
What I get back from Putin is he exits his military alliance with China.
The Sino-Russian military alliance is the number one threat that the United States faces.
And it's shocking that neither the Democrats nor the neocons in our party or the neocons in the Biden administration are talking about that actual threat.
That's the real threat that we face.
And so, if we can use the Ukraine war to pull Russia away from China, kind of like Nixon did with Mao.
We didn't worship Mao, but we said that the real threat back then was the USSR.
So, we're going to open relations with China at least for 10 to 20 years.
That was a decent decision that went south after that.
This is the reverse of that, except Putin is the new Mao.
So, do I trust Putin?
Am I some Putin sympathizer?
No, but I do trust Putin to follow his self-interest, and he can trust us to follow ours, which is to say that we're going to use our own money not to secure somebody else's border halfway around the world, but to secure our own southern border where I would station our U.S. military instead.
And also achieve an actual U.S. objective to say that NATO, I think, has largely outlived its purpose.
By the way, Charlie, I would support creating PATO, Pacific American Treaty Organization, to deter Chinese aggression sooner than I actually support the continued existence of NATO.
Its purpose was to supposedly deter nuclear aggression from the USSR.
NATO is now increasing the risk of nuclear war with Russia.
And so, I think we can get major things out of this.
What I would ask Putin to do, demand that Putin do, is remove nuclear weapons from Kaliningrad, which borders Poland, get the military, Russian military out of Cuba, Venezuela, anywhere in the Western Hemisphere.
These are other major concessions that he gets in return.
He gets to freeze the current lines of control.
We commit not to support Ukraine.
We commit that Ukraine will never join NATO, which is what Putin asked for before he invaded, that we refused to give him after Angela Merkel spouted off about the fact that the Minsk agreement was just about actually biding time.
Well, now we actually advance American interests and recognize that pull Russia out of China's camp, then we've actually made major progress.
And Charlie, I do think it takes an outsider.
I'm not a professional politician.
I'm not beholden to the donor class.
I do think it takes an outsider to see this with clarity and to say it out loud.
Okay, I'm curious, Vivek, you mentioned something.
I first want to commend you for your courage and clarity on Ukraine.
But why would Bill Ackman, a hedge fund manager, care so much about Ukraine?
Help me understand this.
And look, I'm not criticizing him personally, Charlie.
It is just the establishment view in both parties right now, a belief that the United States, for a low ROI, can actually still get a great return on its investment by helping Ukraine win this war.
I just think that's the backwards way of looking at it.
Now, I think that there are also separately other people at military contractors and otherwise that are making a lot of money off of this war.
That's a separate answer here in the United States, which I think is real, which drove us into other foreign wars that we should not have been entangled in.
George Washington would have been rolling over in his grave about Iraq as much as he is now watching our military engagement in Ukraine.
But there's a deeper flaw here in our foreign policy itself, Charlie, which is when an institution like NATO has outlived its purpose, as I believe it has, it should not continue to exist.
It's like the administrative stated here at home.
It should be a task force instead of a permanent body.
Once the purpose of that body is gone, when the USSR fell, you know what?
That was the end of the actual true need for NATO in the first place.
Instead, what did we do?
We reneged on a lot of our commitments.
James Baker promised Gorbachev in 1990 or 1991 that none of the old Warsaw Pact countries would actually join NATO.
Now those countries have joined NATO.
NATO has expanded far more after the fall of the USSR and is now purposefully taking steps that knowingly increase the risk of nuclear war with the very country that NATO was formed to deter that nuclear war with.
That's backwards.
And it's doing, you know, who's laughing at this?
It's China because this is now driving Russia into a more dependent relationship on China, which puts Xi Jinping in a stronger position, vis-à-vis the United States.
And keep in mind that it's Xi Jinping's country that we depend on shamefully for the way we live our lives as Americans.
And so for me, this is a sweeping foreign policy vision, Charlie, that defects from the establishment of both the Republican Party and the Democrat Party, saying that declaring independence from China is my top objective.
But that's not just a slogan.
There's going to be a clear plan for delivering it.
And one of the things I'm going to need to do is make sure we dissolve that Sino-Russian alliance.
And the Ukraine war, if you want to see one silver lining in it, this gives us our chip to actually deliver that.
Because frankly, it does not matter to the United States whether the Donbass region, which by the way, from much of human history has been part of Russia as colloquially understood, the Russian-speaking region, et cetera, that doesn't matter to us compared to actually achieving this American objective of pulling Russia away from China, move from a bilateral international order that favors China to a trilateral one where the three nuclear powers are not immediately aligned with one another.
I think that's actually a good thing.
So Vivek, I want to address just two things here, one of which I'm completely behind.
I think is really interesting.
The one that I think we need to have you have a chance to talk about, 25-year voting age, which has gone totally viral, raising the voting age.
Combat Roles and Mental Health00:02:22
The second one is trans and military.
I think that transnies have no place in the U.S. military.
You have some nuance on this, and we're getting some emails on it.
Talk about those two issues.
Yeah, they actually go together, and there's a reason why.
So what I've said in this country is voting age is 25, but you get to vote at 18 if you serve the country.
That's a longer conversation, Charlie.
But I think we need to revive civic duty and make citizenship actually mean something.
But if that's where I'm coming from, and that's a nationalist position, I have to be consistent in what I say.
So I am against, I'm with you, against any trans military members on the front lines in combat roles.
So we share a view on banning it in combat roles.
However, I think where we might have a difference of opinion is that I can't be in the position where I'm calling on more service in the country, even as a precondition to vote, to say that in non-combat roles where it doesn't present that same risk, if there's somebody who wants to serve the country, that we're going to be in a position to say that in an administrative role or a legal role, that we're going to say no.
I think the real problem with the trans movement, Charlie, is trans is a mental health epidemic in our country.
Part of the mental health epidemic comes from our hunger for cause and purpose and meaning that's unfulfilled by faith, patriotism, and hard work.
So I believe as a humane person that we need to help people who have mental health illnesses, not by putting this country at risk, not by putting them in combat roles.
Forget that.
That's the job of actually fighting the enemies and keeping this country strong.
But I have to be consistent on principle to say if somebody wants to serve the country in a legal administrative role as a fire, as an administrative role in a police office or in a JAG office or in a legal role in the military, keep in mind most roles actually aren't even combat roles.
I'm fine with that, but get rid of the woke indoctrination.
And I've been the hardest line on that.
And you're also been very clear about accommodations, right?
No special surgeries, no bathrooms, none of that nonsense.
Where I disagree is that they should have no place in the military on paperwork or whatever.
You don't let schizophrenics or people with serious mental disorders get near a nuclear arsenal.
But we could talk about that another time.
Vivek, great job.
Thank you so much.
And come back soon.
The Ukraine stuff right on point.
Excellent courage and clarity.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts.
As always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening and God bless.
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