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July 17, 2023 - The Charlie Kirk Show
35:06
Ask Charlie Anything 152: Michelle Obama's Ethno-Narcissism? Christian Alliance with Islam? Mike Pence Said What?
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Student Loan Bailout Approach 00:11:06
Hey, everybody.
Happy Monday Ask Me Anything episode where we take questions from you the audience.
Student loan bailout, again by Joe Biden.
Should Christians partner with Muslims in politics?
And did Mike Pence say he doesn't care about America or has no concern about America?
Is it true?
That and more.
Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com and 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 campuses.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
Turning point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
Brought to you by the loan experts I trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at andrewandTodd.com.
The Ask Me Anything episode.
Blake, how are we doing?
Oh, we're doing great, Charlie.
John asks us, he's from Waterloo, Iowa.
He says, Charlie, what's the latest with the student loans?
I heard Biden's doing something unilaterally.
Blake, you actually are pretty well read up on this.
What's going on?
Yeah, so just for those who don't remember, along with all of the affirmative action stuff the Supreme Court did a couple weeks ago, they also did a ruling on President Biden's big student loan forgiveness plan.
He basically came out and said, we can use this piece of post-9-11 law that we passed for national emergencies to say that the COVID national emergency lets us forgive, I think it was about like $440 billion in student loans, just whoosh.
And the Supreme Court said, that's going too far.
You can't do that.
That is an abuse of the law.
And they struck it down.
But then the same day, they clearly knew this was coming.
The Biden administration just gets out and they're like, we're going to find a different way to do student loan forgiveness.
So they're still doing it unilaterally.
It is less.
They're clearly like trying to find every angle they can.
So the announcement they made today is they found a way to forgive $39 billion worth of loans for 804,000 different borrowers, which if you do the math, I think it's like $40,000 a person or something.
That's a lot of money.
And they found that for it's under like their student loan forgiveness plans that you can sign up for, where if you make payments for 20 years and you're doing public service or whatever, they will forgive it.
Now, the way they extended this is they took people who actually had not been making payments, like if they missed payments or they did only partial payments, they just essentially said, oh, actually, we're just going to count those and still give you the amnesty.
So no rewards for playing by the rules.
And it's $40 billion.
We used to kind of care about large amounts of money like that.
That's a decent number of dollars for every single American and just snap your fingers and get rid of it.
But it does show what the Biden strategy is, which, you know, the one big sweeping approach didn't work.
It got shot down.
But now they're taking a distributed approach.
Attack it from all these different angles.
Make it less of a public focus.
You know, 30 billion here, 30 billion there, and soon you're talking about real money.
And you're gradually transitioning us to a new system where what we're going to get is we're just going to have a de facto bonus four years of school that everyone's going to get.
And all the money is going to go to these universities.
These cartels.
Yeah, this university cartel.
They'll be super woke in most cases.
And they'll basically be dependent on public money.
And The plan going forward is a system that will be so generous towards such a large share of the borrowers that what we're really doing is we're going to be announcing we're going to give $50,000 or $100,000 to every university that can get someone to attend it.
And only a small slice of those people will ever be meaningfully expected to repay all of their loans.
Yeah, and I mean, it's a mechanism of control because they're not even forgiving all the loans.
It's just enough to keep you coming back to vote for more.
Yeah, it's enough that you still have to worry about it getting taken away.
And it's also what really stands out to me is that we'll be funneling all of this money to these schools, and they basically just get it.
Even though they have endowments.
They have endowments, but not every school has an endowment, but it's just that these schools are basically wholly dependent on the federal government for their funds because so many of these couldn't make it without these subsidized loans.
And then they don't really have to hit any requirements to keep getting them.
Like in theory, the government could say you have to meet these thresholds to keep receiving loans.
Like your people have to make enough money or they have to pay back their loans at a certain high rate.
But we haven't really done any of that.
And I don't see them doing that going forward because the Biden administration has really talked about how great HBCUs are.
And HBCUs have terrible loan repayment rates compared to a lot of schools.
And sadly, on the Republican side of things, we're often really allied to for-profit colleges, and those also have pretty bad numbers.
And I feel like no one is talking about the obvious way to fix this problem, which is, I think, the system you want is one where you can do student loans, but the college has to co-sign it.
If the college co-signs.
That's interesting.
Okay.
So they're betting on you, basically.
Yeah, like essentially change the system from we're giving the money to the student who then takes it wherever.
We're thinking of the student is actoring in collaboration with the university.
The university, we have expectations for you.
And if this student who you say is deserving of all this money doesn't, isn't able to pay it back, they'll be the first one to pay it back.
But if they're not able to do it, the school is on the hook for it.
Yes, well, that's smart.
And if the school, then that removes so much of the moral hazard that exists right now, where it's just get them in, trick them whatever way you can, get the money.
To now, if this doesn't work out for this person and for society, they don't get the money.
The graduation rate, 41% of people that enter drop out.
Yeah.
41%.
And, you know, and they do it in programs that we know we have no meaningful need of additional grievance studies graduates.
North African lesbian colleagues.
Yeah.
And or even just a lot of other things that are superficially serious and technical that we still just don't need.
And then the fact that we treat all of these programs very equally, like there's no, you don't get a lower interest rate if you're going to study mechanical engineering.
No, and you should.
And you should.
And we should encourage people to either study practical things or if it's an impractical thing, it should be cheaper.
It should be cheaper to teach English than to teach advanced chemistry.
I don't think you need a chemistry lab to teach Shakespeare.
Right.
And so, I mean, this is very rational stuff.
But right now, the college syndicate is basically untouchable right now.
Yeah, so far.
I mean, both parties defend it, too, especially in red states.
They do.
There's some positive signs, of course.
I think the new college remake strategy is not something you'd want for every single school.
I don't think you necessarily want the University of Texas to be exactly like Hillsdale because it's just, it serves a much bigger purpose.
It has, you know, a med school, a law school, does all these extra things that Hillsdale doesn't do.
But what it does show is you have to treat these schools as what they are, which is they are state-backed, essentially political entities.
And there's a lot of conservatives who I think are sentimental about colleges, and they get easily bamboozled by a certain image of colleges that's not accurate anymore.
And my opinion is you should look at any college trustee position as the equivalent of like appointing someone to a Supreme Court or any other lifelong appointment.
Not necessarily lifelong, but that it is a political appointment.
It is a political office.
It's not something that you just give to a donor the way like we hand out ambassadorships to people, which is often what is the case.
You have to look at it as this is a super important, heavily political position that involves an institution with thousands of employees and tens of thousands of students.
And if we approach it that way, we can get better outcomes because we should just approach it from first principles.
What would we want a university to do?
Why doesn't the university look like that?
What do we change to make it like that?
And that might mean abolish a ton of programs, abolish how it's run, change how its classes are done, and yeah, change what we're willing to pay for.
Yeah, and also just, I mean, you said have the colleges be on the hook.
And do you think it's time to tax the endowments?
Is that a good idea?
I mean, Harvard has a $50 billion endowment.
I think that definitely has valence.
It's something that appeals to people.
Like, it does make no sense that Harvard should just $40 billion.
Stanford.
It is not the biggest problem with universities in the sense that the richest schools are not the ones whose students are going broke.
But they are charging them insane amounts to students.
They do.
$10,000 here to go to Harvard.
But they also charge essentially nothing to anyone low-income who goes there.
They just massively soak rich people who go there and the upper middle class who goes.
Don't they take federal money, though, too, Harvard, for low-income Pell Grants and stuff like that?
I'm not sure the exact details with what they might do for low-income students.
Most of their federal money is going to be federal income.
It's largely untouched capital, right?
And so it only makes them less likely to ever contort to external pressure of like, hey, don't do that.
Screw you.
I have a $40 billion endowment, right?
What I'm getting at is the list of schools that have an endowment of over $4 billion, for example, is pretty small.
And that's like 20 schools.
Yeah.
Whereas a ton of schools, hundreds of schools, basically have minimal endowments and they get by entirely on the fact that they're eligible for federal loans.
And those schools, if you change endowments, yeah, they'll scream about it, but they're not existentially concerned with that nearly as much as how we do our loans, how they're paid back, what we expect schools to do with them.
And the same goes for most public schools.
Like your big flagships have a ton of money, but a lot of the lesser ones are more just dependent on what the state gives them every single year.
And those schools are going to be far more responsive to the incentives we create for them.
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Princeton Thesis Hate Crime Bill 00:04:35
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Okay, so we're getting a lot of questions about our affirmative action take, Blake.
Blake, can you just, am I being unfair when I say that Michelle Obama's thesis is barely readable?
Is that an unfair thing to say?
I mean, it is.
I think it is technically readable in the sense that, you know, a human being who has been trained in phonics can like place their finger on the text and if they're paying attention, they can deduce what was meant by it.
But it is very, you know, as the, as the Hitchens.
You have to reread it.
Let me bring up that history.
So let's just remind people: I said that Michelle Obama, Joy Reed, and Katanji Brown Jackson stole a spot that an otherwise applicant, qualified applicant would have said, would have had.
I should have said not just white person, but white or Asian or otherwise qualified applicant, but it's live on radio.
I don't apologize for it in the 80s.
Like America didn't have as many Asians then.
It was like in the 90s and 2000s.
And by the way, all of them self-acknowledge and admit Michelle Obama's high school counselor said she didn't have good enough grades to get into Princeton if it wasn't for affirmative action.
Which is what Michelle Obama told us.
This is not even a competing story.
It's not like we sought out her high school counselor and we did some sort of Reitbart story or something.
Hitchens back in, this is writing for Slate, I believe.
He did a lot of writing for Slate.
He did a lot of writing for Slate, which is like a liberal-leaning publication.
And he wrote, I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama.
I have no idea if I'm doing a Hitchnecks.
That's pretty good.
I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama's 1985 thesis at Princeton University.
Its title, rather limited in scope, given the author and the campus, is Princeton Educated Blacks and the Black Community.
To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake.
The thesis cannot be read at all in the strict sense of the verb.
This is because it wasn't written in any known language.
And having read chunks of it, like what it does is it has a lot of, you know, you have to use that sick thing several times in it where they, there's like some typos and misspellings and grammatical flubs that they probably ideally would have caught.
But, you know, you don't have spell check.
It's the 1980s.
But what really stands out about it is just, you know, she's been given this incredible opportunity to, you know, without having the proper test scores, attend this top five world university at Princeton.
And, you know, she can study anything she wants.
And what she does is she writes a thesis on like being black at Princeton, like an autoethnography thing.
You know, you could have at least studied some other group coming to Princeton.
You might have like expanded your horizon a bit.
And instead.
That's awfully narcissistic.
It is.
Which is also what I said.
Yes.
Ethno-narcissism.
It's like if you just, you know, think about the incredible number of scholars.
You know, you're like Indiana Jones or something.
Like, I want to study this.
The Mesopotamians or the Indigenous Aztecs.
Think of like what the Mormons do.
You know, they learn all these other languages and learn all these other cultures because they want to spread their faith all over the world.
And then on the flip side, you just have Michelle Obama who's like, the world needs to know more about what it's like being me at the school that I attended.
Yeah, I mean, Brian, you speak like Cantonese or something, right?
Spanish, yes.
Spanish is still a language spoken by many interesting people and many, many uninteresting ones.
But, you know.
It's incredibly narcissistic.
Okay, so, but let's play some tape here because the internet is melting over this.
Sheila Jackson Lee, what a career.
Play cut 115.
First of all, it amends a certain section and adds to race, ethnicity, and religion and just simply adds white supremacy motivated.
So, and it is the context of a hate crime legislation.
And you've noted individuals who are not, may not be white, who are pushing white supremacy views.
It is an anti-hate crime bill.
If you're engaged in a hate crime, you need to be punished because you have harmed someone ultimately if someone is injured because of it.
Sheila Jackson Lee, let's then remind people, why, where is she?
And they think they're making a strong argument, Blake, when they're saying this.
They think we're like, oh, of course, I should reconsider.
I've lost Sheila Jackson Lee.
Muslim Noble Alliance Concerns 00:12:48
Reconsider my public policy positions on affirmative action because of the outright brilliance of Michelle Obama to change the brown jacket.
Exactly.
In an insurance company in Des Moines, Iowa right now.
Michelle Obama might have to do whatever Michelle Obama otherwise would have done.
PlayCut 52.
But I rise today as a clear recipient of affirmative action, and particularly in higher education.
I may have been admitted on affirmative action, both in terms of being a woman and a woman of color, but I can declare that I did not graduate on affirmative action.
This is my personal story.
I can declare, Blake.
I couldn't hear it, so I don't know.
Oh, no, you couldn't hear it.
I'm sorry.
She's like, I could declare that I got into college because of affirmative action.
I do declare that.
They think this is persuasive.
They think that we're going to win over people on the affirmative action thing.
Okay, email us freedom at charliekirk.com.
We have a lot of questions, including Tucker Carlson's jousting with Republican candidates.
Tucker is the best.
He is the alpha beast in journalism.
Why these candidates thought this would be good for them is perplexing.
Why they thought running for president.
Because it's in Iowa.
I mean, we should do our next event in Iowa.
Everyone will show up.
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Mike Pence and Tucker Carlson sit down.
Blake, you have to help me understand why are they afraid to come to turning point, but they're like excited to sit down with Tucker Carlson.
Maybe they're thinking like, well, in 2017, I went on Tucker.
Like, it was a fun time at Fox and was really friendly.
There's no way they haven't thought deeply about this.
No, it's entirely possible they haven't thought deeply about this.
They have professional GOP consultant staff, and those people frequently don't think at all, let alone deeply.
But they don't want to come to turning point because of something.
The whole thing's really bizarre and strange to me.
Yeah, I mean, it'd be really funny if Tucker was just like, who wants to fly to Florida with me?
Wow.
All right.
And then he's coming on to our event.
Tucker will be.
Yeah, he'll be here.
Tucker's great.
Which, okay, so which cut is the one where, okay, because we're getting a lot of emails on this.
Is it true that Mike Pence said that America is not his concern?
So I think we have the tape here.
I think we do.
There's like a garden variety here.
So let's play this.
This may or may not be it.
Let's play cut 130.
You are distressed that the Ukrainians don't have enough American tanks.
Every city in the United States has become much worse over the past three years.
Drive around.
There's not one city that's gotten better in the United States.
And it's visible.
Our economy has degraded.
The suicide rate has jumped.
Public filth and disorder and crime have exponentially increased.
And yet, your concern is that the Ukrainians, a country most people can't find on a map, who've received tens of billions of U.S. tax dollars, don't have enough tanks.
I think it's a fair question to ask.
Like, where's the concern for the United States in that?
Well, it's not my concern.
Tucker, I've heard that routine from you before, but that's not my concern.
Holy cow.
Did he really say that, Blake?
Like, I thought someone was being deeply unfair.
Andrew, tweet it out immediately.
Blake, did I hear that right?
I don't know because I don't have headphones on.
All right.
So Mike Pence said to suicides, the decay country says, Tucker, I've heard that routine before.
That's not my concern.
America is not my concern.
That was a poor choice of words.
I don't think he's going to be elected president, Charlie.
Bold take, but I'm ready to pronounce it right here.
How is this person even allowed in a Republican primary by saying America is not my concern?
Well, he does look good in a suit.
The Republican Party always has a vulnerability, especially like 2000 to 2012 of like find man who looks like very rectangular shaped in a suit.
He could play a president on like one of those Fox shows about the war on terror.
You know, he can stand up and be like, America is firm in its resolve and its resolution against the irresolute in Rezolushistan.
And, you know, he could be good at that sort of thing.
So that's enough to become governor, house member, whatever circuit of offices that he had, all the way up to vice president.
But now he wants to become president and he hasn't updated and we're not going to be as merciful on strange gaffes like this.
No, but he said it twice, just so we're clear.
He said, that's not my concern.
That's not my concern when talking about the decline of America.
Well, we could also just take him literally.
It probably isn't his concern.
No, I know.
Mike Pence is running to go be like the prime minister of Ukraine.
Well, I mean, Ukraine has 35 million people, so it's got like 50 electoral votes in the 2024 election.
It's larger than California.
Yeah.
Millions of electoral votes.
No, they will try to create statehood.
It's just.
You know, the funny thing is, if they propose that, I would support it a lot more.
Like, make the argument.
Ukraine should be a state.
Like, whatever.
It's got European Christian heritage.
We can make this argument for it.
Yeah, so Tucker says the country's falling apart, and he says, it's not my concern.
It's not my concern.
Wow.
Okay.
Mike Pence.
Yeah, he said to Tucker, I've heard this routine from you before.
Yeah, you know, like representing pesky American voters.
He's heard the routine before.
It's a good routine.
A lot of people agree with it, Pence.
A lot of GOP primary voters.
Pence said it twice.
By the way, most of your Republican leaders hate you that much, just so we're clear.
You're not my concern.
Zelensky is.
You're not my concern.
You're not my concern.
Boy, you could put that on a poster, couldn't you?
You're not my concern.
I remember an old story about some GOP politician.
It might have been Boehner, but don't quote me on it, where supposedly someone was browbeating him.
I think it was about marijuana policy or something.
And he goes, you know, you make all these great arguments.
They're all golfing, of course, because it's like 2015.
He's like, you make a lot of great arguments, but they're good for $3 million a year.
And XYZ cause is not.
And then he, why not watch this drive, as Bush would say?
Let's get to another question here.
So, Blake, I went on the Patrick Bett David podcast.
And as you know, I'm a serious Christian.
And Patrick Bett David, who grew up in Iran, I think he's a Christian.
I don't think he's a Muslim, but he has a lot of Muslim friends, obviously.
Yeah, he's Christian, but he definitely has a lot of friends that are Muslim.
He put me on the spot and asked me, he said, Charlie, is it time for the Republican Party to go and embrace Muslims because they're not in the trans thing and they're pro-life?
And my answer was maybe, because I have some huge theological differences with Muslims, and I also think that there's evidence that radical Islam and radical, you know, kind of where Muslims are is inconsistent with some tenets of Western society and culture.
But I also said that I would much rather work with Muslim groups than work with the LGBTQ mafia on anything.
How should I think about this, Blake?
I mean this, I'm not even like leading the questioner.
I was a little bit, you know, it's just a little bit uncertain.
And I'm not like that on many issues, to be honest.
It is a hard question.
I think it's difficult because it does require some humility in acknowledging America has fundamentally changed.
It's less Christian than it was before.
It is difficult to get wins without making alliances that we would have previously considered really strange.
But I don't think it's unthinkable simply in the fact that any alliance, any alliance between different groups is we get into this because we both have a shared interest.
And if American Muslims have the interest of we don't want our kids taught insane LGBT stuff in school, we don't want our kids to be trans by their doctors while we're looking away.
And we also don't want that.
Well, yes, we can have an alliance with them because we want the same thing.
There's no tension there.
Now, if this becomes some sort of broad political coalition deal where, you know, oh, we should embrace like having a million people move here from the Middle East every year as part of this deal, then I would probably say, no, that's not in America's interests and it's not in conservatives' interests and it's not in Christian conservatives' interests.
But to say like, oh, we have a burden to like tell them to buzz off and keep voting Democrats.
Yeah, so let me ask it differently.
Let's say you and I are running Republican strategy.
Should we try to do an outreach to Muslims and Muslim religious leaders because they're really good on the trans issue?
That's a complicated one.
I know it is.
Keep in mind, Muslims are also religiously diverse, as it were.
You have Sunnis, you have Shias, you have people who are really serious about it, you have people who are not very serious about it.
And it's the same thing with Christianity, where obviously we have to try to campaign towards both very serious Christians and cultural Christians who are still relatively on our side.
And it's probably a similar thing with a lot of Muslim people.
I certainly don't think we should concede and say that female genital mutilation is a great idea because some very true noble communities like that.
There's a lot in Islam I don't like.
I also believe that there are some fruits of modernity that Islamic countries reject that are beautiful, like freedom of dialogue and interest and entrepreneurialism and private property rights and separation of powers.
We'll see on the interest thing.
I'm actually very pro-Usuri.
Okay, well, I mean, the Bible, we sometimes have to read vaguely into the Bible to get clear condemnations of abortion, but we don't have to read very far to find clear condemnations of lending at interest.
Technically, it's supposed to be a ban just between fellow Jews is what the law was supposed to be written as.
Well, yes, but like, so traditionally, that was that Christians believed that they inherited that same obligation.
No, of course, only amongst those in your own belief, though, right?
So like the way that, without getting too far down the rabbit hole of, you know, rabbinical law, it's in the book of Exodus, is that Jews shall not charge interest to other Jews.
That if it's a non-Jew, then it's fine.
But, you know, but yeah, but the tradition of the church is that like the church, the Christian church is Israel today, so to speak.
Yeah, so but do you think interest has been a good thing for Western economies?
Probably.
I think you can engage with that question of like, well, actually, you know, a 2% or 3% rate of interest that matches inflation is not extortionate.
They'll find ways to explore it.
I think interest is great when, I mean, personally, if I want to get a home loan, like I think it's good that a home wants, a bank wants to bet on that, right?
I think we can, you know, we can confront the fact that when the Bible condemns lending at interest, their problem is not this like 6% like Aquinas will write that this is unjust because it causes a good to be created out of nothing without the labor input into it.
When it's really that the problem is that historically debt would enslave people.
And so that's also why you put out the tradition of debt.
It also could be confiscatory.
That's not the right word.
Well, it might be.
Or punitive where you have like, what is it?
The payday lenders, right?
Which are just completely predatory.
Oh, for sure.
And I think, you know, obviously there's been, my home state, South Dakota, actually had a ban on that a few years ago.
Yeah, and in the American South, it's really big.
It's payday lending.
Everything's really big.
I mean, go around Phoenix and you can find a lot of cash advance type places.
Yeah, it's not good.
So, okay.
So bottom line then, Blake, so is it we should have some openness?
I mean, so, for example, we have the LGBTQ mafia on the card, you know, they're the rainbow guard.
Pence Tape Play Clip Trouble 00:06:36
I mean, we make alliances with appalling nations that believe that how should we think about alliances?
I think, it's like I said, we have to be clear on what is our interest that we are trying to pursue.
And the alliance can last as long as that shared interest exists.
And you don't need to be, you just don't over-sentimentalize these things and you don't concede more than actually is wise for you to give up.
And like, that's kind of why NATO has gotten so bad for us, is that like NATO existed, where all of these countries that support free market capitalism and religious liberty and all these things, we oppose communism.
We need a military alliance to oppose communism.
Communism went away, and we're like, well, now NATO just has to keep existing because it has existed.
So now we must oppose Russia.
Well, now Russia doesn't, is like more socially conservative and Christian and all of that.
So we have to be anti-those things.
And now NATO's the gay alliance.
No, it is.
I mean, that's what it's become.
And I've said this before.
Social issues are one of the main reasons why this Ukrainian-Russian war is ongoing, which is hilarious why Mike Pence is so enthusiastic behind your craze.
There's just so many people who are like these strange, it's like in the movie GoldenEye, the Bond movie, Judy Dench calls Bond a relic of the Cold War.
We have too many relics of the Cold War sitting around.
But we have also too many people that are still parroting the muscle memory of the Cold War.
Email us, freedom at charliekirk.com.
I'm going to play that Pence tape again for us guys, and I want to try to get away for Blake to listen so we could be super fair about it.
I want the whole thing.
I really want to say, is there an argument to be made that Mike Pence, he says it twice to Tucker Carlson, not my concern.
I've heard this routine before.
Not my concern.
We tweeted that out, right, Andrew?
Okay.
Okay, we're going to play the clip again.
It's not good for Pence.
There is a potential defense vector, though, but Pence didn't help his case at all when Tucker said, well, then why aren't you worried?
Why aren't you concerned about the United States?
And then Pence said, that's not my concern.
It's not good.
If you were like team Pence to defend Pence of what he was trying to say, I think what he was trying to say is that Tucker's caricature of him is not actually the concern.
No, let's play the clip.
Yeah, I mean, it's not good.
It's bad.
It will be cut up.
And it also plays into the schedule of why do you keep on visiting Ukraine, Pence?
Play Cut 130.
Listen carefully.
Drive around.
There's not one city that's gotten better in the United States.
And it's visible.
Our economy has degraded.
The suicide rate has jumped.
Public filth and disorder and crime have exponentially increased.
And yet, your concern is that the Ukrainians, a country most people can't find on a map, who've received tens of billions of U.S. tax dollars, don't have enough tanks.
I think it's a fair question to ask.
Like, where's the concern for the United States in that?
Well, it's not my concern.
Tucker, I've heard that routine from you before, but that's not my concern.
I'm running for president of the United States because I think this country's in a lot of trouble.
I think Joe Biden has weakened America at home and abroad.
Okay, so the word concern is said many times, and it actually means something different every time they're saying it.
He does say your concerns with Ukraine.
No, but then, no, no, no, no.
But then Tucker says again, where's your concern for the United States?
And then Pence says, well, that's not my concern.
No, but he's not.
He's probably mentioning the first concern, not the second guess.
I think he might have been saying, my concern is not Ukraine.
And then he's saying, you know, I'm running for president because I think America's in trouble.
No, the implication is not running by Ukraine.
I know, but then he says both domestic and abroad.
And you're like, wait a second, like that, then that plays into it.
But you have to understand.
I mean, my bias is always that to be relatively charitable towards people.
And I don't think, you know, even if we have a lot of problems with Mike Pence, I don't think he decided to spend this decades-long career and then go on stage and say, you know what, America?
And then flip the bird, two birds to the entire crowd.
I don't know.
Just understand.
If you look at the transcript, it will look bad for Pence because Tucker says, where's your concern for America?
That's not my concern.
That's true.
That's true.
That is the sequence of the fact that it's not.
The first time he uses concern in that exchange for Ukraine.
Totally fair.
There's actually two concerns going on that are two different things that are in the same word.
I don't dispute at all that this will be bad.
I mean, it's already clearly bad.
It's been written up here.
It's going viral.
But I do, as trying to be objective here, I don't think that is what Pence meant.
No, I hear you, but it's what he said.
Play cut 132.
I've heard that routine from you before, but that's not my concern.
I'm running for president of the United States because I think this country's in a lot of trouble.
I think Joe Biden has weakened America at home and abroad.
And as president of the United States, we're going to restore law and order in our cities.
We're going to secure our border.
We're going to get this economy moving again.
And we're going to make sure that we have men and women on our courts at every level that will stand for the right to life and defend all the God-given liberties enshrined in our Constitution.
Anybody that says that we can't be the leader of the free world and solve our problems at home has a pretty small view of the greatest nation on earth.
We can do both.
If you listen to that, he says he's kind of making, I'm going to be president of America, but then he says, we're also going to be leader of the free world and we can do both.
And it's like, so Ukraine is your concern, man.
I mean, that is what you say is, but I don't think Pence was saying, like, I don't care about all those American things.
But here's how Pence should have answered.
Tucker, I'm always America first.
That would have been.
Of course he should have.
But what is he?
He's not a very good politician.
So he's not.
Well, he's only been doing it for 30 years.
Yeah, but you don't need to be a good politician to rise high in the GOP.
That's why we lose a lot of elections.
A lot happening in the country and get involved with Turning Point USA and Turning Point Action.
That's tpusa.com or tpaction.com.
Blake, do you have social media people can follow you on?
No.
Blake is single, so send in your dating resumes, freedom at charliekirk.com.
We're not going to stop Blake.
We're going to get Blake married.
It will be a non-stop pressure campaign.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thank you 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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