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July 6, 2023 - The Charlie Kirk Show
26:35
Big Layoffs for Big Government with Vivek Ramaswamy
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Vivek's Rise and Political Principles 00:13:37
Hey everybody, today's Charlie Kirk show.
Vivek Ramaswamy joins us.
And Vivek, who is now in third place in the Republican primary, makes the case.
Email us, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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Get involved a turning point action at tpaction.com.
We have President Trump coming to our event, Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly, Dan Bongino, Steve Bannon, Josh Hawley, and so many more.
That is tpaction.com, tpaction.com.
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.
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Vivek, to his great credit, is coming to speak in West Palm Beach, Florida.
We have three presidential candidates, and to his great credit, he said, I'm all in.
That's one of the reasons why I think Vivek, not because he's speaking at our event, I wish we were that powerful, but one of the reasons why he's ascending in the polls is he wants to win.
I don't know why these other candidates, we just got a couple new rejections of a couple candidates that obviously have foreign countries to go visit or something else to go do.
Not really sure why, but Vivek Ramaswamy will be there, tpaction.com.
Vivek, I've been looking at the polls.
And again, I'm not a big poll guy, but I like looking at trends.
You are going up in the polls.
In fact, more so than a former vice president and governors.
What do you attribute your rise to, Vivek?
Well, Charlie, I'll tell you this.
We're actually just getting warmed up.
I don't know if you're one of the things I'm doing is in this campaign, I think you know this, speaking truth.
My job is not to tell people what they want to hear.
My job is to tell people what my true beliefs are, who I am, and be brutally honest about that.
I think that strategy is actually working.
Yes, we're working a lot harder than many of the other candidates.
I've done more campaign events than any other candidate on the campaign trail.
I think people are hungry for an outsider.
I'm the first millennial ever to run for U.S. president as a Republican Charlie.
So those are all things I have going in my favor.
But the number one hallmark of this campaign is our top slogan, truth.
Speaking the truth at every step.
As Thomas Sowell once said, if you care about somebody, you tell them the truth.
If you care about yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
We're telling them the truth.
And I think that people across this country, I think they're attuned to the distortions from media or what they're fed from others that have a pretty good sixth sense over the last decade to be able to tell the difference between somebody who's given them political platitudes and poll-tested platitudes versus somebody who's actually sharing their bone-deep convictions.
And one of the things I'm seeing from our supporters, Charlie, is that not all of them agree with 100% of what I'm saying, but they may agree with 90% of what I'm saying, but still know that I mean it 100% of the time.
And so in many ways, our campaign strategy is to not be too strategic about what I say.
You and I have this relationship as well.
When we agree, we'll agree.
When we disagree, we disagree.
But what people really want is the truth.
And I think that that's what we're giving them.
Well, and you can't have the truth if you're a coward.
And that's why Aristotle believes that courage is the greatest of all the virtues, because you might believe in the truth or you might want to know the truth, but you have to have the courage to actually say it.
So just to recap it, the team is resending me the poll, but you kind of saw this spike.
So let's just kind of go back in time.
I don't know if this is a cause and effect, but Vivek, you were the only candidate to show up in Miami with the arraignment of Donald Trump, and you had a true thing there as your press conference.
Why did you decide to go to Miami?
And do you believe the voters recognized that when you visited?
I think in retrospect they did, Charlie.
That was, I promise you, not my objective in going.
My objective in going is speaking on behalf of principle.
I mean, let's be very honest.
It would be easier for all of us, myself included, to win an election if Donald Trump were not in the race.
But that's beside the point.
We have to stand on the side of principle to say that the United States of America should not be a country where the party in power uses police force to arrest its political opponents in the middle of an election, full stop.
And I don't care whether that's good for me politically or not.
I will say that at the time, there were a number of people who actually maybe more wise as political scientists than I. I'm not a political scientist or a poll predictor that predicted that we were going to see a massive spike in the polls about two weeks afterwards, which is what they say the trailing indicators are.
So maybe that did have an effect.
I don't know.
But I do think that Americans are hungry for leaders who stand on principle rather than on the base of self-interest.
Another thing I'll just lift the curtain on, Charlie, let's just talk openly.
I got calls from many donors, and I know almost certainly those same donors are calling the other major Republican candidates as well with the advice to say, do not touch that.
Stay away from that.
There's a good chance that Trump may not even be in the race.
Move and stay away.
Don't sully yourself.
And this is something that you actually are going to want to stay away from as he's going into a dark place there.
Yep.
And I reject that.
So maybe I lost some donors or mega donors over it.
But for me, one of the things that's also been liberating in this campaign is that we're not dependent on mega donors to do this.
If people want to follow us, that's great.
I won't turn it down.
But I've taken, you know, eight figures now over $15 million and counting of my own hard-earned money, put it into this campaign precisely because I don't want to listen to somebody else and what they have to say, viewing me as a puppet.
And the voters, I think, can tell a difference.
We have you for the full hour, Vivek Ramaswamy.
You know, we sent out that tweet saying, hey, you know, whoever wants to show up, I think it's a good idea.
And you listened and, you know, you saw it in the public thing.
You deserve a lot of credit.
And I think the voters are rewarding you for that.
I want to dive deep into the ideas behind the campaign.
That is, I think you could say it now.
It is the fastest growing campaign.
I think that's fair to say.
Vivek Ramaswamy beating Mike Pence, beating Nikki Haley.
What's going on here?
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Right now, the Republican primary field is going through some major changes.
It's hard to believe.
You have a former vice president not really registering, governors not registering, but a businessman with new ideas and a willingness to tell the truth is polling very, very well.
In fact, the field looks, it's Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Vivek, Ramaswamy.
Who would have ever thought that?
So, Vivek, let's talk about some of the issues here.
In particular, we saw on July 4th, a federal judge come in and say that the federal government is not allowed to police speech.
This is a great temporary injunction.
Your reaction, your thoughts.
So, Charlie, this is actually very personal to me.
It was a good July 4th gift.
In January of 2021, I was actually the first person to advance this legal theory on the page of the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere.
And in my book, Woke Inc., that government actors cannot threaten private companies to do through the back door what government could not get done through the front door under the Constitution, censoring protected speech.
And at the time, Charlie, legal scholars across this country dismissed that legal theory, saying this Rafiat is thinking that the First Amendment applies to a private company.
Has he not even gone to high school, let alone law school?
It was dismissed as a conspiracy theory to think that the government was even doing this.
Well, two and a half years later, what do we now know?
Another conspiracy theory is vindicated yet again.
Sometimes I think people need to rhyme.
So here, we'll make it simple.
If it is state action in disguise, then the Constitution still applies, period.
You cannot use a tech company as a puppet to silence speech that you could not censor directly.
Here's a rule of thumb, Charlie.
If Vladimir Putin was doing it, and we would call it a threat to democracy, then it's a threat to so-called democracy when we're doing it here at home as well.
And we would not look kindly on some foreign autocrat deputizing and threatening private companies to silence political expression.
Guess what?
Take a long, hard look in the mirror.
That's what we've been doing for the last three years in this country.
Kudos to this federal judge.
I continue to think that our judicial system is the last backstop for protecting our constitutional freedoms in this country.
And it gave me, frankly, a lot of gratitude to see that legal argument from two and a half years ago invoked by this federal judge to see that injunction through today.
You know, you have Alexei Navalani, who is facing decades in prison, and the United States State Department is issuing press releases.
This is yet another inhumane and terrible action by the Putin government who would dare to use police power to go after their political dissidents.
Simultaneously, that very same regime that is issuing virtue signaling press releases about Alexei Navalani is like, oh, yeah, by the way, Donald Trump might spend 40 years in jail.
It's extraordinary.
So, but let's say you're president of the United States, Vivek.
How would you rein in these administrative agencies?
Because one of my big fears is this court ruling is good.
I think they're going to ignore it.
I don't think they're going to bluntly ignore it.
I think they're going to say, eh, we'll just work around it.
They don't listen to courts.
They don't listen to presidents.
They are their own government with they march the beat of their own drum, their own cadence, and their own rhythm.
How would you as president, from a policy perspective, reign in the Leviathan?
So, Charlie, because I know you can handle the detail, I'm going to go into detail with you.
I think I'm the single presidential candidate in the last 30 years who has the deepest understanding of how to actually shut down the administrative state.
It is a false promise.
Any candidate who will tell you they're going to reform it, that is a false promise.
It cannot be reformed.
It is a leviathan that cannot be tamed.
You strike the swamp, that swamp will strike you back and eat you alive.
But what the U.S. president is constitutionally empowered to do is to actually shut it down.
I've said, I've found our list.
I'm glad other candidates are now taking it up as well.
List of the agencies we'd shut down, from Department of Education to ATF to FBI to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to a range of other agencies.
I've said that I would shut them down.
The top reason Republican presidents haven't done it in the past is they point to so-called civil service protections, which are these protections that say you can't fire members of the bureaucracy.
Well, Charlie, read the law carefully, as I've done.
Turns out those civil service protections apply to individual firings.
The whole point is they don't want a politically accountable president firing based on political motivations and individual employee.
We can debate whether we like that or not, but that's what the law says.
They do not apply to mass firings.
Mass firings are exactly what I'm bringing to Washington, D.C.
We have a clear plan to downsize that headcount by over 75%.
Clear plans to shut down agencies.
There's a law, little-known law, Charlie.
Not a single Republican president has had the spine or knowledge to use it.
It's the Presidential Reorganization Act of 1977.
It says you can actually shut down or reorganize agencies if it either stimulates the economy or reduces redundancies in agencies.
Well, when the DEA is pursuing some of the same cases that the FBI is in parallel, when you have, at the local level, you have local police and local prosecutors.
You don't have a separate FBI in between.
You meet the letter of that law when I will say as U.S. president, without asking Congress for permission or for forgiveness, we will shut down that same J. Edgar Hoover building of the FBI, the same J. Edgar Hoover FBI that was corrupt in the 1960s that's equally corrupt today.
We will shut it down because the law already gives me the authority to do it.
And Charlie, I think one of the positions that people don't pay attention to in the federal government, there's actually two of them.
People always ask me about my cabinet secretary appointments.
Yeah, we'll get to that, and I'm going to say who those are before the end of this year.
But the OPM, the Office of Personnel Management, the person who runs that, that's like the human resources department of the federal government.
The person who runs the Office of Management and Budget, OMB, it's like the CFO of the federal government.
Advocating for Pro-Life Laws 00:02:27
Those are the most important positions.
And if I'm learning from President Trump's tenure, here's what I'm learning to build on that foundation and maybe not repeat some of the same learnings is that you need people in that position who aren't trying to be ambassadors of the administrative state, mediating the interests back and forth between the president and the administrative state.
I'm putting people in those positions that I know that are bulldogs that are seeing this through with one direction to actually shut this down without being ambassadors back to me.
So I can go into more detail, Charlie.
This is the most important topic domestically is shutting down that regulatory administrative state.
I know how to do it.
It's why I'm in this race.
It's going to take an outsider, but it's got to be an outsider who knows the law and understands the Constitution.
That's a rare combination, and that's a big part of why we're making the sacrifice to see this through and get this done.
Hey, everybody.
Look, if you're pro-life, listen carefully.
It's important to advocate for pro-life laws.
I'm all in favor of that.
Pro-life legislation, supporting pro-life candidates.
But you have to simultaneously do the other thing.
I believe you actually have an obligation, which is to support women in need and babies in need that are at risk of being aborted.
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Supreme Court Support and Funding Babies 00:05:49
And so let's just, let's take one of these agencies, the Department of Education, which I think should just be wiped out.
It's completely irrelevant.
They wage war on parents.
They're terrible.
They're basically a crime syndicate for the teacher unions.
Let's just say Vivek says, okay, I want to stimulate the economy.
Is it that easy?
Are you trying to say, forget all these other abstract things?
Because Vivek, I remember being in the Trump White House.
I'll tell you a true story.
I was walking through the Trump White House 2018-19.
I visited, you know, praise God a lot of times, very blessed, probably well over 100 times.
And I was, you know, sitting in meeting low-level stuff, right?
But, you know, stuff that I cared about, college, all this.
And I remember saying, why doesn't the president just fire all this?
I was told can't do that.
It's against the law.
There's no prerequisite.
And, you know, we have to deal with the bureaucracy that we have.
Were they wrong to say that, Vivek?
Yes.
Yes, they were wrong.
And the answer is that the president is absolutely constitutionally empowered to do it.
5 U.S.C. 3302 says the U.S. president sets the regulations governing the Office of Personnel Management, the 1977 presidential reorganization statute, the mass firings not applying to the civil service protections.
They were being too humble, Charlie.
And this is the difference.
I'm not listening to advisors on this because I have a personal bone-deep conviction in what I'm telling you.
And the good news is I've also studied the current Supreme Court.
I give Trump a lot of credit for giving us that Supreme Court.
But those justices agree with my view on this.
I've studied their history of understanding of Article II of the Constitution and the use of executive power.
They absolutely agree with me on this.
So you know what's going to happen?
We will shut down the Department of Education in my first week on the job.
By the end of January 2025, that agency will not exist on my orders.
Of course, they're going to sue over it.
Some person who got fired is going to whine saying that they had some legal right to keep their job.
I'll say, great, let's take that to the Supreme Court.
I know that the Supreme Court now is on my side of this.
What do we do then, Charlie?
We codify that vision into judicial precedent so that the next guy who comes along after me isn't going to have to start with that same handcuffs on his hands.
And I come at this as a CEO.
If somebody works for you and you cannot fire them, that means they don't work for you.
It means you work for them because you're responsible for what they do without having any authority to change it.
And I'm sorry I refuse to be a hollowed out husk of a puppet going through the motions, sitting in that White House.
I give Trump a ton of credit for being the first president to ever roll that log over and see what crawled out.
But if you're going to roll that log over, you better bring the pesticide.
That's why I'm in this.
I've got fresh legs and we are now seeing that through.
That's why I'm in the race.
Well, and this is so fresh, Vivek, because, you know, there I am, a 25, 26-year-old walk into the White House, and I'm just rationally like, well, why don't we just get rid of this agency and this?
Can't do that.
And, you know, I could say the names on air.
They would be names that people would recognize.
But effectively, there was a false operating premise, the whole Trump White House, that all the civil service lifelong bureaucrats said, can't do that, can't do that, can't do that, can't do that.
And it really makes you think we need this kind of fresh problem-solving, entrepreneurial approach to say, no, no, actually, you could just go scorched earth, close this down, close that, close this, do that, close that.
And it really kind of makes you think.
So the FBI, is it time to close it down completely?
Is it time to relocate it out of D.C.?
Okay, so you say abolish the FBI.
Yes.
That's right.
So, at the local level, you've got local prosecutors and you've got local police.
You don't have an intermediary bureaucracy sitting in between.
I'm making my way.
My wife and I are both doing it.
This book called G-Man.
Everybody should read it.
It's called for Government Man.
It's about J. Edgar Hoover.
It is something about the institutional nature of that institution and that bureaucracy itself that is by design a formula for corruption.
It shouldn't have existed in the first place because you don't need something sitting in between the DOJ, which has its own problems, and we could talk about that separately, and the U.S. Marshals, which sit over here, which are like the cops, the actual federal cops.
When you put those tens of thousands of bureaucrats today still reporting into the J. Edgar Hoover building of the FBI, it is almost a formula for the creation of that form of corruption.
So I think it's a false promise for anybody to say, oh, you're fired the head of the FBI and get the bad apples out.
I using language that I hear from some of the other candidates that now want to check this box and feel good about checking that box.
That's not going to get the job done.
I couldn't get that job done because this is a beast that was created in the shadow of J. Edgar Hoover that's doing exactly what it did to Martin Luther King.
This isn't a left-wing issue.
Blackmailed him to commit suicide.
Now going after Trump or anybody who had any affiliation with Trump.
We have to shut the thing down.
And there's good evidence, Charlie.
I mean, we've gone through government shutdown periods where they threatened national security risk if they actually couldn't get paid or their employees were put on furlough.
Nothing bad happened.
To the contrary, I think we're actually going to have greater efficiency if the DEA has more accountability for its own drug cases rather than the FBI competing with it to take on those same cases.
I don't think we need the ATF.
The simple background kitchen that are done, fold that into the U.S. Marshals.
So this is where when you have redundant federal agencies, you're asking for corruption, you get what you pay for.
Absolutely shut it down.
And is there going to be some broken glass along the way, some frictional costs?
Yeah, there are.
We'll be honest about that.
But that's what it's going to take to restore three branches of government in this country, not four.
That's what the Constitution says.
Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
Just when you thought the government would stop trying to take over health care, Senator Bernie Sanders, that socialist Marxist communist, is pushing something that is no good.
Ukraine Deal and NATO Expansion 00:04:41
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There are several major issues that Republicans are kind of fumbling over.
The war in eastern Ukraine continues, Vivek.
I know that you've come under great fire for your clear and your prudent and your wise strategy.
Remind our audience how you would end the war in eastern Ukraine.
I'd end the war in Ukraine with a deal.
Yes, a deal with Vladimir Putin that brings peace to that region in the following way.
I would freeze the current lines of control.
We did that in the Korean War.
It's a Korean War-style armistice.
I would further give Putin the thing he asked for in late 2021, which was a hard commitment that NATO would never admit Ukraine.
Yes, are those big concessions to Putin?
They are.
But that would end the war.
And I would require something greater in return.
That is that Putin has to exit his military alliance with China.
The China-Russia military alliance is the single greatest threat we faced.
Nuclear weapons and the stockpile in Russia, hypersonic missiles.
China's got the second largest economy in the world that we're dependent on.
They're allied.
They're in a military partnership with one another.
So my simple deal is Putin gets what he wants out of Ukraine.
No NATO membership, keep the land that he currently sits on.
But that he has to get out of his deal with Xi Jinping.
Now, this makes Xi Jinping have to think twice before he invades Taiwan, because Xi Jinping's bet right now is that the U.S. won't want to go to war with two different allied nuclear superpowers at the same time if Russia's in his camp.
But if Russia's not in his camp, Xi Jinping doesn't have that confidence.
Couple of other things I'd demand in the deal that are easy gives for Putin are that he moves his nuclear weapons out of Kaliningrad.
That's the region that borders Poland.
Get the military of Russia out of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, will restore normalized economic relationships with Russia.
Those are things you're not allowed to say out loud, Charlie.
Certainly in the neocons and the Democratic Party, but even most of the Republican Party, you can't say those words out loud either.
But that is how we achieve peace, not only in Ukraine, but achieve the top job of the next president, which I understand how to do, is to deter China from going after Taiwan without going to war over it.
And it's really kind of sad that the almost entire Republican Party, with the exception of Trump and myself in this race, are lined up lockstock and barrel with the Biden position on continuing to go to war in Ukraine, on actually NATO expanding even more today when NATO was actually created to deter the USSR.
Now, after the USSR has fallen, NATO has expanded more than it ever has.
Now thinking about NATO supposedly was created to avoid the risk of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, its actions are actually driving us closer to nuclear war with Russia.
We have to find a path out in a way that advances American interests.
I think I'm the only candidate that has offered a clear vision of the deal that I would do and a clear reason why Putin would say yes to that deal.
He doesn't actually enjoy being Xi Jinping's little brother either.
This is a deal that he would do, and it is a deal that absolutely advances American interests while promoting peace, not only saving us the money, but also getting Russia out of China's camp instead of driving them into each other's arms, which is exactly what we're doing today.
We are doing that and it's making America in a compromised position and it's not putting our country first.
Vivek, we're out of time.
We will see you in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Look forward to it.
Thanks so much.
Yeah.
Looking forward to it, guys.
Thank you.
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.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.
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