Andrew Tate Talk and DeSantis' Missed Turning Point with Raheem Kassam and Paul Manafort
The conservative world will be fixated on south Florida this weekend for Turning Point Action, yet Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will be far away. Raheem Kassam talks to Charlie about the message the snub sends, and whether DeSantis is too focused on the "Chamber of Commerce" primary ahead of the grassroots one. Then, Charlie gives his response to Tucker Carlson's ultra-viral super-interview with Andrew Tate, and then talks to a person very familiar with being systematically targeted by the law enforcement arm of the regime, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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DeSantis Campaign Calculus00:14:56
Hey, everybody.
Today on the Charlie Kirk show, I give you my take on the viral conversation Tucker Carlson had with Andrew Tate.
Paul Manafort also joins the program.
And we talk with Raheem Kassam about Ron DeSantis and the state of the 2024 race.
Support our program, charliekirk.com/slash support.
Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
That's freedom at charliekirk.com.
Get involved with turningpointusa at tpusa.com.
That is tpusa.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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The center of the conservative movement will be Saturday, Sunday in West Palm Beach, Florida.
President Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Dan Bongino, Steve Bannon, Josh Hawley, JD Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, Governor Asa Hutchinson, Mayor Suarez, and many others.
But noticeably absent, we received a decline from Governor DeSantis.
And here to make sense of it, it's Raheem Kassam, Raheem, who is not part of Turning Point, so maybe he can offer kind of an outsider's really kind of clear perspective here.
Raheem, what am I missing?
Why did Governor DeSantis decline our invitation to speak to 6,000 grassroots super activists?
Well, Charlie, thank you for having me.
I'm sorry to have to talk about this issue because I know it's probably a particularly insulting one as far as you're concerned.
I almost feel like I should be interviewing you about this.
And, you know, it's one of these things where you got to look like below the surface of this.
I know a lot of people were speculating immediately that perhaps Ron DeSantis was worried about getting booed or jeered up on the stage.
And my attitude towards that was, well, no, not really.
I mean, it's a very welcoming audience.
I've been to several of your events.
People are never rude or churlish, especially to speakers that have been around on that circuit for years and years, as Governor DeSantis has been.
And so I started to sort of think about, you know, what are the other pressures on the Florida governor at the moment that might be causing him to have to kind of park, to put it in a mild sense, snub is probably more accurate and more, you know, representative of the insult that him and his campaign are doling out here towards those grassroots activists, right?
And what I came down to is this.
DeSantis seems to be able to hop on a plane and get to a different part of the country almost every day to fundraise.
There's no shortage of this.
Yesterday, he was in Wisconsin doing a fundraiser with the Council on Foreign Relations, neoconservative AEI donor who used to give to Rahm Emmanuel.
And he has time for that.
And he has time to go and see his donors in the Hamptons this coming week who are demanding that he explain why his campaign isn't got the momentum that they all promised it would have, especially if you give me $200 million, which people have done.
And so I think this is probably coming down, like actually coming down to what the campaign would refer to in Newspeak as like scheduling clashes, right?
But what it really means is crisis form.
It's Crisis and Crunch talks with the donors.
It's Crisis and Crunch talks about Iowa.
It's Crisis and Crunch talks about why he's not making a move in the polls.
And unfortunately, I think your event is getting the thin end of the wedge there.
Yeah, and again, I don't want to play the victim.
We have an amazing lineup here, but Raheem, I'm trying to understand the calculus of the DeSantis campaign.
It's perplexing to me because you have voters that you have to win over.
And by the way, we did a ton of events with Governor DeSantis last fall.
Our audience is very fair.
I see it completely differently.
If he wants to be the nominee, get in the arena and try to assert dominance.
You know, buy a booth, do an influencer reception, try to win over the audience, open up questions.
You know, Raheem, it's not just our students that are there.
We have hundreds of pastors of mega churches that will be there.
We have 500 donors.
We have 10 billionaires that will be there.
So it's not like there's no donors if that's a big priority, right?
Every major media outlet will be there.
300 influencers will be there.
But Raheem, I'm just trying to understand the calculus.
And yes, we do consider it a little bit of a snub.
And President Trump, his credit attending is really something.
Does it show you that there's some sort of a plan that DeSantis has that we have not yet been read into, which is to kind of win the Chamber of Commerce primary first before actually speaking to donors?
Because what I can say, Raheem, is what we are receiving from attendees and grassroots, hundreds of messages.
People feel insulted that he is not attending this weekend.
Yeah, I'm not surprised.
I mean, the interesting part of it is that so many people may have been coming along in part to hear from Governor DeSantis, right?
Knowing that you would have, and he's been at turning point events before, knowing that you have other presidential candidates up there probably thought like, hey, yeah, this is going to be a good time for me.
You know, I've read so much about what's going on in the media.
I've seen him on Fox all the time talking about this, that, and the other.
But I'd really like to get up close and personal and see, yeah, maybe see if he's as awkward as people say he is.
Maybe see if you can disprove some of those things by meeting with him in person, rubbing shoulders, shaking hands, all of the things that go on at political conferences.
And to turn your back on that, like you said, this isn't just a student summit.
There are thousands upon thousands of other leading people in the movement who will be attending your event.
And it seems like this, okay?
So Reuters today puts out a story that says, Iowa is do or die for DeSantis, right?
And this story appeared to be briefed by the DeSantis campaign.
At least that's how it read, right?
People who know this world know what those stories tend to look like.
And a source close to the campaign said this.
Well, yeah, you just talked to the campaign and somebody didn't want to go on the record.
So they are themselves now saying we are going to replicate the Ted Cruz strategy of 2016.
Now, remember, Ted Cruz won Iowa, but also remember, Ted Cruz did not become the president of the United States.
Ted Cruz lost the nomination.
Ted Cruz was not the one up there on the debate stage against Hillary Clinton.
And thank goodness for that, quite frankly.
As much as Ted Cruz is good on some issues, he would have been no way near a candidate as strong as Donald Trump on that stage against Hillary Clinton.
And so you look at who he's got behind him, DeSantis, right?
Jeffro, Axiom Strategies, that whole Cruz campaign team from back in 2015, 2016.
And you go, oh, I see.
You're just trying to do a redox.
And the reason that they're spending more time fundraising rather than actually campaigning, which would involve turning up at your event, is because the consultant class want their big bucks paid out.
What is the finish your thought, please?
Well, look, here's the other part of this that I've been saying for months now, is that they're not running a populist campaign.
They're not populists.
The MAGA skin suit is about as much as they have offered to the Republican Party base in recent months.
And sometimes it's not even that.
They're putting together a new oligarchic establishment Republican donor class.
And by the way, they're barely hype.
You can see when he goes to the Dominion Law Lawyer's office to fundraise.
You can see when he uses Rom Emmanuel's old backers.
You can see time and time and time again, Council on Foreign Relations, all of these guys.
That's the team he's putting together.
And that's not a populist way of campaigning.
And maybe he's telling us something.
Maybe he's telling us, look, I'm not that much into you.
So there's this story.
I don't know how accurate it is, Raheem, that there's a kind of a crisis meeting in the Hamptons.
Can you fill us in on that?
I saw that you kind of broke that story, added some commentary to it.
Yeah, that's right.
Look, we were following up on a lot of the reporting that was done by Charlie Gasperino on the same issue earlier this week.
And I think this story has gone around a little bit around the rumor mills, around the gossip mills.
And it just came to a point where somebody was ready to report that out.
And that's what Gasperino did.
So we pick up on the basis of that using my sourcing, the people I've spoken to, you'd be surprised at how many people down in Florida actually still want to, I say this as if you're on different sides, but reach out across the aisle of this Republican presidential primary and talk about what's going on and what needs to be fixed and the problems that are manifesting themselves down in Tallahassee at this current point in time.
And so, yeah, it looks like at some point over the next few days, DeSantis and perhaps some key members of his team, his inner circle, are going to be in Southampton, in the Hamptons in New York, and having to explain to some quite peeved donors, like, hey, where is our money actually going?
Because you have moved in the polls.
You've moved downwards in the polls.
So what's going on?
You know, are we going to be supporting you in the future?
Tell us what the plan is.
And of course, the briefed plan back to that is, you know, we're playing the long game.
Well, let's get into the I want to get into the detail about that.
And also just, you know, Trump's standing in the party.
I got in a little bit of a heated conversation with DeSantis donor the other day, and that's fine.
Like, he has a right to do that.
And he's like, oh, Trump's going to lose the nomination.
I don't know one person that's voting for Trump.
It's like, yeah, you live in Aspen.
Okay.
Like, just you live in Aspen.
Okay.
You live in Aspen.
Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
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Raheem Kassam is with us from National Pulse.
You guys should all become members of National Pulse.
They do a great job, independent.
They're terrific.
I think it's $9 a month, right, Raheem?
That is very cheap in the grand scheme of things.
The nationalpulse.com is where we break the news and we have a great new podcast called The Campaign Trail, where once a week I go through kind of the detail.
And I guess this weekend I'm going to be talking a little bit more about the detail and the stupidity of skipping an event like ActCon, like a turning point event, which Governor Santis is apparently doing.
You also have a charity run you want to mention, Raheem, before we dive back into the theme you had previously?
Yeah, I'm very grateful.
So every year, this is the third year I'm going to be doing the 5K for Tunnel to Towers.
You know, they're 100% rated charity, which means most of the money goes straight to the causes.
It's just a 5K.
It's nothing crazy.
But it was crazy a couple of years ago when I was 50 pounds heavier and hadn't run in about four years.
But now I do it every year and I try and raise as much money for them as possible.
You know, they build homes for veterans and the families devastatingly impacted by 9-11.
They do such great work.
I'm sure most of the audience know Tunnel to Towers already.
But if you want to help out, the website is just runsignup.com forward slash Raheem, runsignup.com forward slash Raheem.
Or it's all over my social media.
So you can check it out there at Raheem Kassam everywhere.
Thanks for letting me pitch that because it's a charity that means a lot to me.
They're a great charity.
So Raheem, let me ask you, and maybe you could segue this into something you wanted to kind of touch on.
Do you believe that the more establishment donor class, of which I'm friendly with some of them, not so many other ones, right?
You have to build big things.
You don't try to create enemies.
We certainly disagree in a lot.
But at least I'm talking to them and I'm gleaning from them that DeSantis' stock is down.
Do you think they're going to draft a different candidate, Yunkin, or try to revive Mike Pence or Nikki Haley?
Because DeSantis was supposed to be the challenger.
He was supposed to be the chosen one.
How do you see this playing out?
Yeah, absolutely.
And when you look at the statement that the DeSantis campaign is making ahead of this crisis summit with potential donors in the Hamptons, they say, oh, we're playing the long game.
Well, let's get into the time period that's required here because there is no long game to be played, especially if Iowa is the do or die, as the DeSantis team themselves are now saying.
You really have just about three months left to make your mark, about 90 days left to make your mark.
By the time we reach mid-October, early November, it's going to be impossible, impossible to shift people's opinions as if they're finding it easy now, right?
They're not.
They're not shaving half a point off Donald Trump's numbers.
You know, there may be trading points back and forth between Mike Pence and Doug Bergham and Vivek, who's catching Ron, quite frankly, and who I expect perhaps by the end of summer may even have caught him.
No, I think Vivek could finish second, just so we're clear.
He is on pace to be the second delegate in the convention, the second most delegates.
Do not be surprised if Vivek Ramaswamy next summer convention has 10% of the delegates.
Andrew Tate Strikes a Chord00:09:27
Yeah, I mean, he's working so much harder.
He's doing like dozens and dozens of events, especially right now in Iowa every week.
He's going all over the state.
And, you know, he's actually cutting through.
When you listen to him talk at some of these events, some of these conference speeches, he's actually cutting through, receiving way more applause than Ron DeSantis or any of the other candidates.
He makes a lot of sense.
And, you know, I think personally, I think he would make a great commerce secretary or something like that.
But Vivek is actually running a pretty coherent and successful campaign for where he started from, he's gone up.
And from where Ron has started from, he's gone down.
So let's get back to that long game thing, right?
The long game isn't there.
There is no long game to be played right now.
So he's treating the donor class even that he has his begging bowl out for.
He's treating them with contempt.
He's effectively telling them you're stupid.
And I believe that you don't know how this all works.
So I'm just going to tell you what I think is going to keep you on my side.
The answer to your question is yeah.
They're already interviewing a number of different candidates out there who they think they could either get behind.
I'm sure Doug Bergham would like to sit on the casting couch there.
Glenn Younkins certainly is.
Mike Pence certainly wants to do that.
There are others.
I read this morning a hilarious article about how Chris Christie sees the path to victory ahead of him.
So there's no shortage of people out there who would bend appropriately if a donor said so.
Can Chris Christie see his toes?
That's the first question.
So Raheem, in closing here, 20 seconds remaining.
Trump looks stronger than ever.
And to his credit, he's doing the work.
Raheem, final thoughts, 15 seconds.
Chris Christie couldn't even see your toes if you were standing five foot away from him.
That's my final thoughts.
That's so true.
And we're being mean, but honestly, he deserves it.
So, but we're out of time, Raheem.
NationalPulse.com.
Look, Trump, to his credit, he's working his tail off.
He's doing a lot of events, interviews.
He is showing up.
He's doing the work.
Spending time with President Trump at Benminster a week and a half ago, there is zero entitlement.
He wants this, and I think he's going to earn it.
Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
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So I kind of live in a bubble at times and kind of a created bubble.
That's what happens when you honor the Shabbos and you turn off your phone and you don't have any social media apps.
So kind of on the fringes, I guess you could say, I would hear Andrew Tate, Andrew Tate, and Andrew Tate.
And I didn't, I was like, okay, whatever.
Who is this guy?
And apparently he got really, so he's a kickboxer.
He's the son of a chess legend.
That's important.
I'll tell you in a second.
And he got super, super popular for talking about masculinity in particular.
Now, I'm not an apologist.
Apparently, he's participated in a lot of behavior that I would deem reprehensible.
You could say he ran a cam girl business.
He's accused of rape.
So putting all of that and factoring all that in, I never was overly interested in Andrew Tate, full disclosure.
People seemed really interested in him, and I was like, okay, what is this?
Just a fad or whatever.
So I have a lot of respect for Tucker Carlson.
He's a good friend of mine.
We've spent a lot of time together and he's coming to our event this weekend.
And so, and also Patrick Bett David has been on the Andrew Tate thing for a while.
And I've never said anything critical of him.
Again, I don't really have any strong opinions.
If you don't know who Andrew Tate is, Andrew Tate was the most Googled man in the world last year.
Pickboxer, incredibly well-built, like ridiculously muscular, super fit, was a professional kickboxer, as I mentioned, but really kind of made his name in the last couple of years, going on social media, speaking out against the kind of postmodern, secular, anti-masculine agenda that has been setting into the West.
And if you're like me and you're like, who is this guy?
I think it's actually worth thinking about what he has to say.
And it's notable because over the span of a week last year, they deplatformed him from everything.
It was the Alex Jones Donald Trump treatment.
From every major social media website, he was tarred and feathered, largely because he was so skilled at dominating TikTok and social media platforms, saying things you are not allowed to say.
Now, there's kind of, from what my research in the last 24 hours, there's kind of two versions of Andrew Tate.
There is Andrew Tate sitting down with Tucker, who's incredibly precise with his language and very mainstream in how he presents himself.
And then there's TikTok Andrew Tate, who's a little bit more grandiose and braggadocious, which is fine.
I mean, you're allowed kind of two different presentations of yourself as long as there's some harmony in your messaging.
And so if you were to watch Tucker Carlson's interview with Andrew Tate, you're like, wow, this guy's so rational and all this.
And yes, I don't think he ceases to be rational, but his TikTok persona was very provocative.
And by the way, I agree with almost everything he was saying.
Again, all while understanding he is under accusations of rape and running a cam girl business and all this other stuff, not stuff that I consider to be necessarily virtuous.
However, Andrew Tate struck a chord.
We have not seen a viral sensation like Andrew Tate since, in my opinion, Jordan Peterson.
Jordan Peterson came on the scene and went totally viral.
Andrew Tate comes on the scene and just starts dominating.
So I want to play a piece of tape here.
And then I think we have Paul Manafort as I was building into an entire segment on Andrew Tate, but you have to be flexible.
So you guys are going to have to listen to thought crimes for the completion of it.
I'm not an apologist for Andrew Tate.
And here's what I recommend for everybody.
When you hear you're supposed to hate this person, you're supposed to hate this person, just check all of your assumptions aside, which is what, I mean, we have our group chat here, and I literally asked the team yesterday afternoon, I don't understand this Andrew Tate thing.
I literally don't get it.
They said, well, he's viral all this.
So I said, okay, I'm going to watch the interview.
And after about 30 minutes, I say, oh, now I get it.
This guy's pretty smart, high IQ, son of a chess master, saying things you're not supposed to say, ridiculously fit, talking about things you're not supposed to talk about.
Is that why he's imprisoned?
I have no idea.
But he was really targeted in platforms.
So I just want to play one tape here, and then we'll go to Paul Manafort, which I thought was one of the most insightful comments that Andrew Tate had in his sit-down with Tucker Carlson that I encourage all of you to watch.
It's worth your time because you're supposed to hate this man.
I don't hate him or love him.
But to be honest, when I was watching the interview, I couldn't stop watching.
He's saying stuff that strikes a fundamental chord of what is wrong in Western society.
Play Cut 57.
When you want to conquer a society, you kill the military-age males.
That's what you do.
That's the first thing they've ever done.
They walk in and all the men have to have their throats cut.
They can't perhaps do that, but they can certainly cut your balls off.
And then you can't resist.
And I think there's certainly a movement to ensure that there's very little resistance left inside of the number one demographic, which is required to resist oppression, which are military-age males.
And they don't want those kind of people waking up with any kind of self-respect or standards or to say, no, I don't accept this.
I do not need a ninth injection.
They don't want that.
They want you to sit and say, hmm, I don't need it, but the news said so.
So, a lot to finish on that topic, but I want to get to our friend here, Paul Manafort.
Paul, welcome to the program.
I want to point our audience to your book, Political Prisoner, by Paul Manafort.
And so, Paul, I mean, I don't want to overly connect the themes here, but Andrew Tate is now facing a bunch of charges in Romania for what considered to be thought crimes.
You were a political prisoner and targeted by the regime, and Donald Trump is now being targeted by the regime.
Did you have just some top-line thoughts of how our judicial system has now kind of metamorphosized into a way to imprison people that hold ideas or participate in political parties that are against modern orthodoxies?
Yeah, Charlie, you're so right.
I mean, depending on where you align yourself in the political spectrum, it determines what kind of political rights, real kind of constitutional rights you have.
You know, my case, you know, I was on the wrong side.
Two-Tier System of Justice00:07:13
I was Donald Trump's campaign chairman, and they spent two and a half years trying to get me to say things that weren't true.
And because I wouldn't, they violated a lot of my constitutional rights and made up crimes and put me in jail.
And I never worried about it at the time because I felt like this was the United States of America.
This is a country that I've been defending the values of all around the world.
But times have changed.
And in my book, you talk about, which was written a couple of years ago, I was concerned.
And the reason I wrote the book, I say that, was not just to get my side of the story out, but really to warn the American people that there was a two-tier system of justice and that even everyday Americans were going to be in the crosshairs if we didn't take our government back and our country back.
And unfortunately, my predictions have all seemed to come true.
And to the point that they're even going after a former president and creating crimes like the DA did in New York that just don't exist on the stats and the statutes, and then citing an espionage act to deal with document production.
It's just outrageous.
But at the same time, you see with what's going on in Washington today with the Department of Justice and Hunter Biden, they've got a laptop with so many fair violations on it.
Yes.
That they totally ignored it.
And with me, they had to create a fact pattern using people that I had hired and legitimately were working for publicly and were registered.
And they said because I had hired them, I was responsible for their work.
And even the fair unit didn't agree with that.
But when Mueller was appointed, Weissman told the Fairer Unit that they were taking over and their understanding, the Fair Unit's agreements with me were thrown out.
Well, and it's just so everyone understands, it's such a loosely written statute.
The intention of the law was a good intention.
1930s don't want Nazis to come into our country.
But if you read how it's written, as you all know, Paul, it's like any contact with any foreign official, whether money is exchanged or not, could make you and by the way, it's supposed to be a failure to register, just so we're clear.
It's a registration statute.
It's not even an activity statute, but they then criminalize, they've only used it nine times since the 1930s.
They dusted off this law.
You did legitimate international business for years, and they said we hate this guy because of his proximity to Trump.
Now they've ignored that precedent towards Hunter Biden, who has done clandestine, illegitimate borderline treason activity with foreign nationals.
Your thoughts, Paul?
Well, I mean, the laptop shows meetings that Hunter had on behalf of Barisswa, on behalf of the Chinese, on behalf of the Russian oligarch that hired him.
I mean, there actually are meetings, there are memos, there are emails.
So, there's no question about what kind of activity was involved.
There was like deputy involved, but they just ignored it.
And this plea deal that they've agreed to, I mean, basically, what, as I understand it, the plea agreement says is that any and all other crimes are thrown out.
And only the three that he's pled to, or the two that he's pled to, you know, the third one being the gun registration issue, which is not even going to be a conviction unless he violates that the plea agreement.
But in that plea agreement, they cleanse him of everything else that's on the laptop.
And I hope the judge takes a serious look at it because it's a serious problem.
And this Justice Department is just unabashedly promoted as a fair treatment when all they have to do is look at the precedent they set with me and they'll see that it's not that it's a different tier of justice.
So, Paul Manafort is with us.
Check out the book, Political Prisoner.
He said it best, your civil rights and your treatment is directly connected with your politics.
That's such a sad reality.
It's where we are right now.
Paul, what advice would you give Donald Trump after your brawl with the Department of Justice?
Well, the key thing I think I would say is, I mean, this is obviously a big difference.
He's running for president.
I was not.
Yes.
And it's important to the president needs to understand what they're trying to do.
They're trying to get him off message.
They're trying to get him dealing with the legal issues and not dealing with the campaign issues.
And I think what's important for the president is he's got very good counsel.
One of the lawyers, one of the lawyers that represented me, and actually won in New York for me.
He's very bright.
He understands the law.
He understands the tactics that the DAs and the prosecutors are going to try to play.
Let him deal with the practice because right now it's a motion practice.
It's on the law.
The issues that the Trump campaign is focused, Trump legal team is focusing on relate to really the problems with the indictments.
And I think the president, the American people, at least on the Republican side, they've already made their opinion known to the president about how they feel about this.
Even people, American Republicans who are supporting other candidates support Donald Trump in this matter.
And frankly, I think a lot of Republicans are recognizing that they have to vote for Donald Trump as well.
Otherwise, the left is going to get its way with trying to establish this two-tiered system of justice.
So what I think President Trump needs to do is focus on his number one job, which is getting himself re-elected or elected president of the United States.
Let his lawyers do the motion practice.
That's not to say he doesn't have to deal with the framework of the absurd two-tier justice system, because the American people see it.
I mean, all the latest polls now, you see the FBI has credibility of 24, 25%.
You know, the Justice Department's in the same place.
So President Trump's defining of the two-tiered system of justice has impacted.
And he doesn't, I mean, he needs to get elected so he can clean up the swamp.
That's his job.
And that over the next year is what he needs to do.
And clearly, in watching him on the campaign trail, he gets that.
And he's focusing on that.
And I think that's disappointing the Democrats somewhat because they thought they'd have him dealing with all of the issues of obscurity of the Espionage Act and this crazy stuff they're trying to do down in Georgia.
And he's not falling for that.
And that's the biggest advice I'd give to him, but he's already following his own advice in that regard.
So just from a personal management standpoint, you could feel as if your world is falling apart and the government just tries to demoralize you.
They have unlimited assets.
They have the media on their side.
How did you stay hopeful when it looked as if the whole regime was trying to basically give you a death sentence to get you to go to jail?
Fighting Bogus Charges00:01:17
Well, I mean, first was my faith.
It was very important to me because I knew I didn't do anything wrong.
And I knew that these charges were bogus charges.
I also knew that the president of the United States knew they were bogus charges.
I tried to stay inward.
I wouldn't let them, you know, what they were saying about me define how I felt about myself.
My family was there.
My friends were there.
And I've always felt that the end of the day, that one way or another, I would not spend the rest of my life in jail, even though that's what they were trying to do.
And thank you to President Trump for providing me a pardon because he knew I was there under the wrong, for the wrong reasons.
And he also knew that I wouldn't give up hidden by lying so that the prosecutor would go easier on me.
And so that's what my faith, my family, and knowing that I had done nothing wrong and believing that Donald Trump would, in the end of the day, do the right thing.
Paul Manafort, author of the book Political Prisoner, thank you so much.
Thank you, Charlie.
Good seeing you again.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts.
As always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thank you so much for listening and God bless.
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