The Charlie Kirk Show - Ask Charlie Anything 170: Free Speech for Hamas-Lovers? Trump 2.0 Cabinet? Santos Unleashed?
Aired: 2023-12-11
Duration: 35:41


=== Freedom of Speech Limits (10:12) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey everybody, and ask me anything with yours truly, Andrew Colvet, producer of the Charlie Kirk Show, and Blake Neth, another producer of the Charlie Kirk Show, and Ivy League Greg, but don't hold that against him.
[00:00:12]  We talk about three things in this discussion.
[00:00:15]  All three are extremely controversial.
[00:00:17]  One, is it right to be kicking out people that say from the river to the sea and into FADA at Harvard, Penn, and MIT?
[00:00:26]  Or is there a better way?
[00:00:27]  Are we going too far with speech restrictions that will then be used to attack conservatives?
[00:00:32]  Very interesting conversation.
[00:00:34]  And then we talk about Trump 2.0, an Axios article that shows who he might pick for his cabinet.
[00:00:41]  It's a really fascinating discussion.
[00:00:43]  Is he going to be more based?
[00:00:44]  Is he going to be more effective in the second term in 2025 if re-elected?
[00:00:50]  What do we have to go off of?
[00:00:51]  Very, very fascinating.
[00:00:52]  And then I had to weigh in.
[00:00:53]  Is Taylor Swift deserving of person of the year from Time magazine or not?
[00:00:58]  Okay.
[00:00:58]  If you have not gotten your tickets to Amfest yet, go to Amfest.com, the largest multi-day conference in the movement.
[00:01:05]  You're not going to want to miss it.
[00:01:07]  Starts on December 16th, just days away.
[00:01:09]  And also consider becoming a member of Charlie Kirk Exclusive, where we put members-only content just for you there.
[00:01:17]  And by the way, if you are a member and you show proof of it and you're going to Amfest, you get to watch Charlie record his interviews with people like Tucker Carlson live and in person.
[00:01:26]  We're only letting members into those settings.
[00:01:29]  So you definitely want to do both.
[00:01:30]  All right, folks, you're not going to want to miss this discussion with me and Blake Neff.
[00:01:34]  Buckle up.
[00:01:35]  Here we go.
[00:01:36]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:01:38]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
[00:01:40]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:01:43]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:01:47]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:01:48]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:01:49]  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.
[00:01:57]  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.
[00:02:06]  That's why we are here.
[00:02:09]  Brought to you by the Loan Experts I Trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at andrewandTodd.com.
[00:02:18]  Andrew Colvet filling in for the one and only Charlie Kirk.
[00:02:22]  Honored to be behind the microphone.
[00:02:24]  Love having the guest host gig.
[00:02:27]  And to join me, Blake Neff, one of the other producers on the show, joining me actually from In Studio.
[00:02:32]  Welcome to the show, Blake.
[00:02:34]  Hey, Andrew, good to be here.
[00:02:35]  Yeah.
[00:02:36]  So our inbox is full with people.
[00:02:38]  I mean, Charlie had a couple viral tweets about this, about the Harvard, MIT, Penn, congressional testimony.
[00:02:46]  Very explosive, probably, if not the biggest story, top three stories of the week.
[00:02:50]  We've talked about Bill Ackman, but one of the things we haven't really talked about is this question of are we going too far?
[00:02:57]  Are we sort of saying, well, all of a sudden now free speech is outlawed, right?
[00:03:02]  So is that what we are demanding of these university presidents by saying, hey, you have to condemn this speech by saying from the river to the sea or into FADA?
[00:03:13]  You have to condemn that so much to the extent that you have to kick these students out and you have to remove from the student organizations, you know, their official register of organizations, any groups that endorse or repeated these statements.
[00:03:27]  I think you have an interesting perspective on this because you've been, I've been noticing in our conversations, you've been hitting the brakes a little bit saying, is this the right way to go?
[00:03:35]  What's your take, Blake?
[00:03:37]  Yeah, so there's really like two major outcomes we can have here.
[00:03:41]  We can have the outcome of, and you kind of see both paths even in the statements we're getting from like Bill Ackman.
[00:03:48]  You have the outcome of, okay, we've realized that universities have become toxic places and we're seeing, yeah, there's a lot of anti-Semitism on campus and that is a manifestation of a bunch of other antis they also have on campus, you know, anti-white, anti-everything else.
[00:04:05]  And what we should do is we should try to get away from that and we should make it so campuses aren't places that are indulging a lot of like, you know, racial hate or, you know, anti-male hate or whatever else have you.
[00:04:19]  Or we can go the other way and sort of make it so we'll just carve it out where we'll be, okay, you can't say bad, like you can't say bad things about Israel.
[00:04:28]  You can't say bad things about Jewish people.
[00:04:30]  And we'll kind of just slot this aside as its own thing.
[00:04:34]  And then we'll just go back to the way things were before.
[00:04:36]  And what we want is we want this to give us momentum for things to get better across the board.
[00:04:40]  And I think one of the ways that universities are terrible is they'll claim that they support free speech, but they really don't.
[00:04:46]  You have absolute freedom to say whatever you want as long as it's bashing white people or something.
[00:04:52]  But you can't say something that essentially offends liberal sensibilities, whether it's on racial stuff or LGBT stuff, any of that.
[00:04:59]  And the good outcome of this would be we use this to get momentum for total free speech, like the kind that would be advocated by fire.
[00:05:10]  And the bad outcome is, yeah, we just use this and we increase speech restrictions.
[00:05:14]  And I'm a little worried that's what we might get.
[00:05:16]  Like the other day, we had the presidents of Harvard and Penn and I think MIT were on Capitol Hill testifying about this.
[00:05:24]  And one of the things that happened was Elise Stefanik was browbeating, I think, the Harvard president, about whether they would revoke admissions offers from students based on what they said.
[00:05:34]  And I think my position and the position of a lot of people would be we shouldn't revoke admission offers from people based on what they say unless it's really genuinely criminal.
[00:05:45]  And that means literally advocating specific violence.
[00:05:47]  Oh, yeah, yeah.
[00:05:48]  Let's go ahead and play CUP 41.
[00:05:50]  You mentioned it, this hearing on Capitol Hill 41.
[00:05:54]  Well, let me ask you this.
[00:05:55]  Will admissions offers be rescinded or any disciplinary action be taken against students or applicants who say, from the river to the sea or into FADA, advocating for the murder of Jews?
[00:06:08]  As I've said, that type of hateful, reckless, offensive speech is personally abhorrent to me.
[00:06:16]  Today that no action will be taken, what action will be taken when speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies, including policies against bullying, harassment, or intimidation, we take action.
[00:06:30]  All right, so this is the crux here is, is the statement from the river to the sea or into FADA inherently calling for the death of Jews, right?
[00:06:41]  And we've sort of debated this.
[00:06:43]  I think it's very clear that it can be meant that way.
[00:06:46]  But in popular sort of jargon of this protest movement on the left, is that what they're calling for?
[00:06:52]  I think we're parsing words a little bit here.
[00:06:53]  If we were saying, you know, death to all black people, I'm pretty sure the admission would be rescinded from that Harvard person if somebody said that.
[00:07:02]  Your take, like, on the flip side, you know, we have things like kill the boar, and we'll get New York Times articles that will explain how kill the boar is actually part of this rich protest history.
[00:07:13]  It's very complex.
[00:07:14]  It's very complex what kill the boar means.
[00:07:16]  Which means kill the whites.
[00:07:18]  It means kill the farmer, literally.
[00:07:19]  But yeah, it means kill white South Africans.
[00:07:21]  And the lyrics of the song are literally just like, kill the boar, shoot, shoot, shoot, kill the boar, shoot.
[00:07:26]  And that's all it is.
[00:07:28]  And you will get, you know, you can get really deranged rhetoric against white people on campus.
[00:07:34]  If you've been on campus in the last decade, you've definitely seen it or you're not paying attention.
[00:07:39]  And, you know, I think my overall position is it is better for campuses to have absolute free speech rules.
[00:07:47]  I kind of go back to, you know, like maybe the Chesterton principle.
[00:07:51]  He had a line where he says like rules are generally better than just sort of informal drift.
[00:07:57]  And if you have an absolute rule of everyone gets free speech, that will sometimes allow bad things, but it'll allow a lot of good things that might otherwise get suppressed.
[00:08:06]  And when you instead have this norm of we'll kind of ad hoc figure it out and sometimes you just don't have free speech, then what will happen is powerful people and powerful groups will use that to deny speech for things that are totally legitimate.
[00:08:21]  And so, you know, things like intifada.
[00:08:23]  Intifada means uprising.
[00:08:24]  It does mean it is calling essentially for a violent uprising against Israel.
[00:08:28]  Do we agree with that?
[00:08:29]  No, neither of us agree with that.
[00:08:31]  Is it inherently genocidal?
[00:08:33]  I don't necessarily think so.
[00:08:36]  And I think you could say that if you were going to ban that, you are giving a lot of ammunition to people who would say, well, any number of conservative things are actually calling for violence.
[00:08:47]  The people who say Trump, when he says, we need to fight, that's calling for violence.
[00:08:51]  We need to put him in prison.
[00:08:52]  I agree with 50% of what you're saying.
[00:08:54]  I agree with the fact that we have to acknowledge that for the foreseeable future, conservatives will have less power institutionally in the university systems that we are now sort of clamping down on, right?
[00:09:08]  So these will be any rules we create right now will be used against us, so help you, God, right?
[00:09:14]  You bring up Amy Wax, who's been on this show, prominent, very controversial at UPenn, that is a conservative, one of the few, and they are trying to remove her tenure, right?
[00:09:25]  For really basic stuff that we say on this show all the time.
[00:09:29]  But I do believe that when you say intifada or from the river to the sea, you are inherently calling for the genocide of Jews.
[00:09:37]  So I do believe in the destruction of the state of Israel, which is inherently, you got to kill Jews if you're going to destroy Israel, right?
[00:09:43]  Well, they would deny that.
[00:09:44]  They would say, of course, to devil's advocate here, what they would say is they're essentially calling for Israel to become like America, not a sectarian state, not a racially premised state.
[00:09:56]  And so they say like, you know, for Palestine to be free, it would mean that Palestinians have the right of return.
[00:10:01]  They have the right to vote.
[00:10:02]  They have all these things that they currently can't do within the greater state of Israel.
[00:10:06]  That is what they would say.
[00:10:07]  Well, I think they want to abolish Israel.
[00:10:09]  I think they want to call it.
[00:10:11]  A lot of them want to do that.

=== Society Is Way Too Fat (04:15) ===

[00:10:12]  And a lot of them do glory in all this violence.
[00:10:15]  I mean, they really wallowed in all of this disgusting stuff after October.
[00:10:18]  That's very disgusting.
[00:10:19]  But nevertheless, like, the tradition in the United States is you literally can go out and say Hitler was right.
[00:10:25]  You can say that, and that is freedom of speech.
[00:10:27]  And, you know, actual violence, actual calls for violence have been narrowly defined as you have to kind of have two out of three of specific person, specific time, specific place.
[00:10:38]  If you have two out of three things, that's kind of enough, and you're calling for violence.
[00:10:41]  That is enough to say that this quality has a real violent threat.
[00:10:45]  Specific person, Jews, specific place, Israel.
[00:10:49]  I think that's getting pretty broad.
[00:10:51]  That's getting pretty broad.
[00:10:53]  It literally has to be much more narrow.
[00:10:55]  Like, we're going to go to, you know, this specific square, this specific street corner in Tel Aviv and shoot all of the Jews there.
[00:11:03]  That would qualify in traditional U.S. stuff.
[00:11:06]  But even saying, you know, like kill Whitey, kill Whitey now, that wouldn't be a violation of speech rules traditionally in the U.S.
[00:11:15]  And I think the period we regard as the best of America followed those rules.
[00:11:20]  And I think we should try to keep them.
[00:11:23]  All right, you've probably heard me.
[00:11:24]  It's actually now 25 pounds that I have lost.
[00:11:28]  And I'm sure some of you say, oh, Charlie, I've tried everything.
[00:11:31]  That was me.
[00:11:32]  You know, my first Zoom call with my PhD weight loss.
[00:11:36]  I was kind of skeptical.
[00:11:37]  I was like, come on, guys.
[00:11:39]  All right.
[00:11:39]  I've heard this whole thing before.
[00:11:42]  And boy, was I wrong.
[00:11:44]  They know what they're doing.
[00:11:45]  My PhD weight loss.
[00:11:46]  Look, this is 100% legit.
[00:11:48]  And people say, Well, Charlie, you've lost so much weight.
[00:11:50]  And I say, Yeah, my PhD weight loss.
[00:11:52]  Hello.
[00:11:54]  But look, they have a different approach.
[00:11:56]  And it's Dr. Ashley Lucas.
[00:11:57]  She's great.
[00:11:58]  I text with her.
[00:11:58]  She does a really, really good job.
[00:12:00]  25 pounds, I'll tell you.
[00:12:02]  And I have more energy and I'm healthier than ever before.
[00:12:06]  Here's why.
[00:12:07]  The program rids your body of the inflammation that is causing so many health problems.
[00:12:13]  If you look around today, America is the fattest it has ever been.
[00:12:16]  Our families, friends, and neighbors are dying of diabetes, heart disease, and Alzheimer's, now called T3 diabetes.
[00:12:25]  PhD has helped so many people who want to have a good active life, play with their grandkids, travel, hike to a waterfall, go for a bike ride, but their weight was holding them hostage.
[00:12:35]  They don't want any of you on experimental drugs for your brain degeneration from Alzheimer's or homebound with an oxygen tank for heart failure.
[00:12:42]  My PhD weight loss knows that losing weight is the best thing for overall health.
[00:12:48]  We are way too fat as a society.
[00:12:50]  And here's the thing: if you're listening to this and you say, Boy, I'm a little overweight, it's perfectly fine.
[00:12:56]  Do something about it.
[00:12:57]  Use your free will, your agency.
[00:12:59]  Say, you know what?
[00:13:00]  I'm just not where I want to be.
[00:13:02]  This is an empowerment tool for you.
[00:13:05]  All of these things can be prevented.
[00:13:07]  You look at heart disease, the beast, you know, what they now call diabetes.
[00:13:11]  By the way, there's a great new book by Dr. Peter Atia about longevity.
[00:13:15]  You want to live long, lose weight.
[00:13:18]  Look, Dr. Ashley Lucas, she is the master of this, and she is the genius behind my PhD weight loss.
[00:13:25]  So you can call them today at 864-644-1900.
[00:13:30]  That is 864-644-1900.
[00:13:33]  By the way, this is not like a sign up and you're automatically going to lose weight.
[00:13:37]  You got to do some work.
[00:13:38]  You got to apply yourself.
[00:13:39]  It's not a too good to be true thing.
[00:13:41]  But if you have motivation, they will channel that motivation towards a very positive, measurable, and real outcome.
[00:13:51]  Find them online at myphdweightloss.com.
[00:13:56]  Tell them Charlie Kirk sent you.
[00:13:58]  That is myphdweightloss.com.
[00:14:01]  PhD weight loss and nutrition, physician and dietician developed, individually delivered.
[00:14:07]  Again, I lost 25 pounds and I feel great.
[00:14:10]  If you think you've tried everything, you're wrong until you say you've tried my PhD weight loss.
[00:14:15]  They map you as a whole person.
[00:14:17]  It's not like, hey, just read this book.
[00:14:18]  No, no, no, no.
[00:14:19]  It's a deep dive.
[00:14:20]  It's personalized.
[00:14:22]  It's going to get results for you.
[00:14:23]  Myphdweightloss.com.

=== Trump Immigration Rules Harassment (15:28) ===

[00:14:27]  I was not focused on, but I should have been the irrefutable fact that a call for genocide of Jewish people is a call for some of the most terrible violence human beings can perpetrate.
[00:14:41]  I want to be clear.
[00:14:43]  A call for genocide of Jewish people is threatening, deeply so.
[00:14:49]  It is intentionally meant to terrify a people who have been subjected to pogroms and hatred for centuries and were the victims of mass genocide in the Holocaust.
[00:15:02]  In my view, it would be harassment or intimidation.
[00:15:06]  All right.
[00:15:06]  So that is Penn's President Liz McGill basically.
[00:15:11]  Suzy, soon-to-be ex-president.
[00:15:13]  Yeah, so this is another story.
[00:15:15]  So, and I want to give some credence to what you're saying here, Blake.
[00:15:19]  I definitely believe that many of these people are calling for genocide.
[00:15:22]  I think, you know, you're a two out of three standard that's been used for, you know, violent speech or sort of where you have a, what was it, a specific person, a specific location, a specific time.
[00:15:35]  I don't see how any of that applies to genocide because genocide is by its very nature not a specific person.
[00:15:41]  It's a specific people group, right?
[00:15:43]  And that's why calling for genocide is legal in America, actually.
[00:15:47]  That's what's crazy about it.
[00:15:50]  Well, and I do want to give some credence because there are other levers we can pull.
[00:15:54]  And I think Charlie has been one of the loudest voices on the internet saying, defund, defund, defund, pull your donations, pull your donations.
[00:16:01]  And we have news breaking.
[00:16:03]  I think this was yesterday that we had a $100 million donation to UPenn withdrawn by Ross Stevens, founder and CEO of Stone Ridge Asset Management Group.
[00:16:15]  He's now written a letter saying that UPenn is in violation of his December 2017 gift.
[00:16:21]  It was actually limited partnership units in Stone Ridge.
[00:16:25]  And he's saying you're in breach of our contract.
[00:16:28]  I want my money back.
[00:16:29]  So that's essentially what's happening there.
[00:16:31]  So that is another lever and perhaps the more appropriate way to approach this.
[00:16:35]  Well, for sure.
[00:16:35]  But you want us to look at what are they demanding.
[00:16:38]  And I have no problem with defunding any Ivy League school.
[00:16:41]  They have too much power.
[00:16:42]  They have too much influence in American life.
[00:16:44]  They promote countless toxic things, including the loss of free speech over time.
[00:16:49]  But you do want to look at what we are demanding.
[00:16:51]  And I think a thing with free speech that it's very easy to fall into, and the left did this all the time when they were justifying censorship with big tech or through deplatforming, is they're like, well, the First Amendment only governs the government and it doesn't govern anything else.
[00:17:05]  So any company can fire you for your speech.
[00:17:08]  Anyone can de-platform you over speech.
[00:17:09]  Your bank can de-bank you if they don't like your speech.
[00:17:11]  And that's all okay because it's not the government.
[00:17:14]  And I would say, why do we have the First Amendment?
[00:17:16]  We have the First Amendment because we think speech is a good thing.
[00:17:19]  We think freedom of speech is valuable.
[00:17:21]  That it is tyrannical to say people cannot say what they really believe, that they have to lie about their beliefs because they fear retribution for it.
[00:17:29]  That when you have a more free exchange of ideas, you generally get better ideas, just like the same way that by having free markets, you get better access to goods than you do under something that's rigidly controlled.
[00:17:42]  And again, I think it would be a tragedy if what we get from this is that UPenn comes out and says, okay, our bad.
[00:17:49]  We have a new speech standard that says that a very broad definition of harassment is no longer allowed.
[00:17:56]  As we mentioned, Amy Wax.
[00:17:58]  Amy Wax is a professor at UPenn Law.
[00:18:00]  She has controversial opinions on America's racial issues, on crime, stuff like that.
[00:18:06]  She's made very critical statements about affirmative action.
[00:18:10]  And in response, UPenn is using this bureaucratic process to try to fire her.
[00:18:13]  And it's a big, big long fight.
[00:18:16]  And as long as they have rules that say, actually, our school follows the First Amendment standard of speech, then the rules are on her side.
[00:18:23]  And she has a very strong case that they're trying to fire her for bad reason.
[00:18:26]  But if they have a restrictive rule that says, well, if you say something that offends a lot of people or we decide is harmful to them and that's not allowed, we're going to classify that as harassment, then they'll be able to fire Amy Wax.
[00:18:38]  And they will use this on conservatives.
[00:18:41]  They already do this to conservatives with the more liberal speech rules that they nominally have.
[00:18:46]  And if they end up adopting more anti-speech rules because we're calling for it, I think that would be a big mistake.
[00:18:53]  Yeah, I definitely agree.
[00:18:55]  I go back to the saying is that any rules that we have to see this clear-eyed.
[00:19:00]  Any rules that are created now will be used against us in the future.
[00:19:04]  And mark my words, the university systems are not turning over overnight.
[00:19:08]  They're still going to have the power.
[00:19:10]  What we really need is more reforms, more ideological diversity.
[00:19:15]  I don't know how you get there unless you start mass defunding these people and you start basically saying you lose your protections at the, you know, we're going to start taxing your endowments.
[00:19:25]  Instead of taking out speech, you say this was caused by DEI.
[00:19:28]  This is caused by whackadoodle stuff getting money from the school.
[00:19:31]  And you say, okay, no more DEI, no more anti-white discrimination, no more anti-anyone discrimination.
[00:19:37]  You have freedom of speech.
[00:19:38]  You have a clear standard.
[00:19:39]  You don't rig the system for people.
[00:19:42]  All right.
[00:19:42]  So, Blake, I want to just put one button on this to just add some credence that this is a debate.
[00:19:49]  I think a lot of our audience is probably like, yeah, like calls for genocide, like these kids should be kicked out of school.
[00:19:54]  This is Glenn Greenwald, and then we can move on to Trump 2.0, as I like to say.
[00:19:59]  So, Glenn's tweeting about this right now.
[00:20:01]  He says, There are, by all appearances, millions of people who now believe that there's an epidemic of students marching around chanting gas the Jews and kill all Jews.
[00:20:09]  I've asked around 100 people in the last week for examples.
[00:20:11]  Nobody can give one, let alone show an epidemic.
[00:20:14]  It's scary how easily the public can be convinced that there's a new crisis that requires massive speech restrictions.
[00:20:21]  What's really being done is that Israel supporters have taken longtime pro-Palestinian slogans and declared them genocidal and demanded censorship of them.
[00:20:30]  And I think that is the crux here: if you're saying from the river to the sea and into FADA, is that inherently calling for the death and destruction of millions of Jews living in Israel?
[00:20:44]  And then what do you do about it if they are saying that?
[00:20:47]  It's a fascinating debate, nevertheless, and it's one that I think is branching out more widely.
[00:20:51]  If you want to add anything to that, Blake, if not, we can.
[00:20:54]  You know, I would advise people, we have seen this happen in our own world.
[00:20:58]  They'll say, you know, Trump runs on America first.
[00:21:00]  And they're like, well, America First was also a slogan that was anti-Semitic in the 30s, and so you can't say that.
[00:21:04]  Or, you know, Reagan runs on states' rights.
[00:21:06]  And they're like, states' rights is code for segregation and bring back slavery.
[00:21:10]  And they've done this in our own politics to slogans that we ourselves have used.
[00:21:16]  So you should always be careful when they're using that towards anyone else.
[00:21:20]  But yeah, we spent a lot of time on this.
[00:21:22]  So let's go into this Axios article that came out in the middle of the week, and we've both been talking about it a ton.
[00:21:29]  It's Behind the Curtain, How Trump Would Build His Loyalty First Cabinet.
[00:21:35]  And it's kind of just great, like wish casting.
[00:21:37]  You know, we can look ahead, 2025.
[00:21:39]  We don't have to worry about winning the election.
[00:21:41]  That's already been done.
[00:21:42]  And then what do we actually get?
[00:21:44]  And it's a very upbeat article.
[00:21:45]  I think you'd agree.
[00:21:46]  Just because it's names we would definitely like to see in a Trump White House again.
[00:21:51]  We'd love to see Stephen Miller doing immigration stuff.
[00:21:54]  We'd love to see JD Vance.
[00:21:55]  We'd love to see Tucker Carlson involved somehow.
[00:21:58]  Maybe he'll just be on air.
[00:21:59]  But this son says the CIA.
[00:22:02]  Yeah.
[00:22:03]  This says that Melania Trump wants Tucker to be the vice president, which, and for the same reason we've said on this show, which is he really is like a force multiplier for Trump.
[00:22:14]  He's not, he doesn't outshine Trump, which is what a lot of people would say.
[00:22:17]  It's more like he amplifies Trump.
[00:22:20]  And he's a surrogate for Trump.
[00:22:21]  If Trump is just in a courtroom for half of 2024, Tucker's really the only guy who can do a Trump-style rally without Trump being there.
[00:22:29]  And that would be a huge asset if Trump is absent a lot of the time.
[00:22:33]  So it's a very exciting thing.
[00:22:35]  I do think it probably overplays things.
[00:22:37]  It says right here in the article, you know, Trump is heavily influenced by whoever he last spoke to.
[00:22:42]  He doesn't like making really detailed plans really far in advance.
[00:22:45]  He's very adaptive.
[00:22:46]  So famous last words.
[00:22:47]  It could be that literally none of these people have a job in a future Trump administration.
[00:22:51]  Well, I think the more interesting question is, and we've debated this privately, Blake, is Trump so set in his ways that, in a sense, that was Trump 1.0 basically what you're going to get with Trump 2.0, or can he fundamentally adapt, change, and actually surround himself with better people so that he can achieve his policy goals?
[00:23:17]  I believe 100% yes.
[00:23:19]  I believe that if you get a Trump 2.0, this is going to be the retribution candidate.
[00:23:24]  I think completely.
[00:23:25]  I think he's going to do everything he possibly can to deport 10 million people.
[00:23:30]  I totally believe that.
[00:23:31]  I know that you have raised certain, I mean, valid skepticism about that even being possible legally, financially.
[00:23:40]  Is there going to be resources?
[00:23:42]  The bureaucracy going to get in the way.
[00:23:44]  But I think that many of his goals, he is now more very clear-eyed about achieving them.
[00:23:49]  And frankly, he's got four years, so he's like, I'm not running for re-election.
[00:23:52]  Let's do this.
[00:23:54]  Yeah, well, so it's just, you can see the ways it can go both ways right from the start.
[00:23:59]  You know, the fact that he's considering Stephen Miller for either attorney general, despite not having a law degree, attorney general, or at some sort of immigration deportations art, that's really promising as long as he's able to stick around.
[00:24:11]  But on the other hand, it also says he's considering a Democrat, Jamie Dimon, at J.P. Morgan, for a Treasury pick.
[00:24:18]  And I think a lot of people will consider that pretty frustrating if he just literally picks a Democrat to be Secretary of the Treasury.
[00:24:24]  That is Trump 1.0 vibes.
[00:24:26]  Exactly.
[00:24:27]  That is very Trump 1.0.
[00:24:28]  So I think the best argument for Trump 2.0 would be better is Trump is extremely, he's still extremely angry about 2020.
[00:24:37]  And it sort of says in this article that sort of the basic qualification for any appointees going to make is they have to affirm that 2020 was stolen.
[00:24:47]  And, you know, a natural caveat I can imagine is if he wins in 2024, he won't be nearly as angry about 2020 anymore because he's sort of, he's undone it.
[00:24:57]  He is, he's fixed it now.
[00:24:58]  So will he be as obsessed with people who denied him in 2020?
[00:25:02]  I'm not sure.
[00:25:03]  We'll have to see.
[00:25:04]  The other good argument is, you know, a lot of the people who he was, you know, he might just start as a default with the people who are with him in 2020.
[00:25:14]  And I think we'd both agree the people he had in position by late 2020 were better than who he started with.
[00:25:20]  So if he brings back John McIntye to run personnel again, they were making a lot of great appointees with McIntyre in 2020.
[00:25:26]  If they're doing that right away in 2025, we're going to be way better positioned for the next four years.
[00:25:34]  So I see both elements even in the list of this Axios article.
[00:25:38]  Yeah, maybe the right way to think about it is almost like Trump 1.5.
[00:25:41]  Like aspects of this are certainly going to be better because I think, you know, Heritage has his Project 2025, Turning Point Action has contributed to that.
[00:25:50]  Saurabh, blanket on his last name.
[00:25:53]  This is a whole crew.
[00:25:55]  Russ Vogt has been involved in vetting and creating lists of possible personnel to staff out.
[00:26:02]  We're not just talking cabinet-level positions.
[00:26:04]  We're talking well on down the line.
[00:26:06]  You've got another thing that's been floated, Schedule F, right, Blake, which is essentially how do you get rid of this bureaucratic monstrosity that has formed over decades and centuries inside of Washington?
[00:26:19]  I mean, the fact that our seat of government is in a place geographically that has basically a 90-95% Democrat voters, I mean, it is, it makes San Francisco look like a conservative voting block.
[00:26:34]  That's how bad conservative.
[00:26:36]  Yes, 100%.
[00:26:38]  This is how bad the nation's capital has become and how partisan and how just entrenched.
[00:26:44]  This is why we see these juries and anything that's brought against Trump in D.C., you're just like, it doesn't even matter if they're claiming, you know, that he picked up a quarter, but he said it was a dime.
[00:26:56]  Like, the grand jury will convict him.
[00:26:59]  It doesn't matter in D.C.
[00:27:00]  It doesn't matter in New York.
[00:27:01]  Fulton County is increasingly.
[00:27:03]  I mean, Fulton County is like 80-20 now.
[00:27:05]  I will say, so maybe a good way of thinking of it is maybe it's not Trump 2.0 versus 1.0, but maybe Trump World 2.0, which is you have people who are in Trump's orbit, who have been in his orbit the whole time, but now they understand, okay, if we come in, you know, the Office of Personnel, these different groups are going to be obstacles.
[00:27:27]  And we figured out in 2020 how to solve these obstacles, but we couldn't implement them in time before we had to leave office.
[00:27:33]  But now you can go into it day one.
[00:27:35]  You don't need to spend three years figuring out what you need to do.
[00:27:38]  But one caveat I will say is, you know, you've mentioned it.
[00:27:41]  A lot of people have mentioned it.
[00:27:42]  They're really hyped up, you know, this idea of Trump as the retribution presidency.
[00:27:48]  And even if that's very fun to say, I do think it is harmful to frame it this way, both in terms of, I don't think it's electorally useful.
[00:27:56]  I don't think most Americans like the idea of this guy running when he's like, I'm running to get revenge on all of my personal enemies.
[00:28:05]  I don't think that'll play well.
[00:28:06]  So I would step away from it for that reason.
[00:28:08]  But also, again, we have to think in practical terms.
[00:28:11]  If you're going to have to do these things, you are going to have to get them past judges.
[00:28:14]  And a kind of conventional thing is it is difficult for you to judges and the Supreme Court have thrown out measures before by basically saying this law you passed or this policy you did is not actually a normal product of lawmaking, but you just intended to single somebody out.
[00:28:32]  And, you know, we can't pass bills of attainder.
[00:28:34]  You can't have Congress pass a bill that is just like punishing somebody, one specific name.
[00:28:39]  You could also, judges have also referenced statements made on the campaign trail to then overturn because they looked into the integrity of the people.
[00:28:49]  A lot of these are bogus.
[00:28:50]  They would do this with Trump's immigration thing.
[00:28:52]  They would say like, well, Trump's statements on immigration prove that this bill to close our border, this measure to close our border is driven by hate.
[00:28:59]  And so you can't do it.
[00:29:00]  Normally you could do it, but Trump can't because he's hateful.
[00:29:03]  He's doing it with a bad motive.
[00:29:05]  And I think this is often bogus, but it is something to worry about.
[00:29:09]  No, I think what you're making a fair point in the sense that you don't think a retribution candidate would sell to the general public.
[00:29:16]  I think people listening to this show would probably be like, yeah, we want justice.
[00:29:20]  Yeah, MAGA will love it.
[00:29:22]  MAGA is something bigger than that.
[00:29:24]  MAGA's 25, 30% of the population, like true MAGAs.
[00:29:28]  And then, you know, to win, maybe Trump needs 45% of the vote to win if you have all these third-party people.
[00:29:33]  So you got to get what is the 45th percent person going to be won over by.
[00:29:39]  And we've seen that.
[00:29:40]  You know, we were just talking about the polling in Arizona, how like older voters are less associated less with Trump and more with the Republican Party.
[00:29:48]  They want a return to sort of some of that more genteel political tone.

=== Saving Pre Born Babies Now (02:45) ===

[00:29:56]  Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk.
[00:29:57]  You're exciting news to share about saving babies by providing ultrasounds.
[00:30:00]  Right now, there is a dollar-for-dollar match, doubling the number of babies you'll save with pre-born.
[00:30:04]  There are babies alive today about to celebrate their first Christmas because of what we did together a year ago at this time providing ultrasounds.
[00:30:11]  And right now, you could save twice as many babies.
[00:30:14]  Maybe you're already wondering about end of the year giving and want to give every dollar, get the most results.
[00:30:19]  Or maybe you just want to know that a girl making this decision deserves the truth.
[00:30:22]  So that next year at this time, she's picking out a Christmas stocking for her baby's first Christmas.
[00:30:26]  It's beautiful to think about.
[00:30:27]  Your gift of $15,000, somebody out there can do it.
[00:30:30]  I'm sure will provide not one, but two ultrasound machines.
[00:30:33]  $280 saves 10 babies.
[00:30:35]  $28 a month saves a baby a month for less than a dollar a day.
[00:30:38]  And right now, any gift saves twice as many babies with pre-born.
[00:30:42]  I'm a donor to this organization.
[00:30:43]  We love this organization with the Kirk family.
[00:30:45]  Call 833-850-2229.
[00:30:48]  Full endorsement.
[00:30:49]  Amazing people.
[00:30:50]  Click on the pre-born banner at charliekirk.com.
[00:30:52]  Go to charliekirk.com right now and click on the pre-born banner.
[00:30:58]  I want to wrap up by essentially making my case for T. Swift as person of the year.
[00:31:05]  Okay.
[00:31:06]  I have been left out of this debate.
[00:31:08]  Charlie is very adamant about it.
[00:31:10]  Jack Posobic is very adamant about it.
[00:31:13]  I have an unpopular opinion.
[00:31:15]  And I think that, you know, if you didn't realize how big Taylor Swift's tour was this year, you're living under a rock.
[00:31:23]  And I don't think she's as bad as some others.
[00:31:25]  I do think that she's a powerful voice that we're like poking.
[00:31:28]  And we're like, come on, get political, get political, get your army out to the polls.
[00:31:32]  I dare you.
[00:31:33]  Which I think was a tactical mistake because she is left of center.
[00:31:37]  I don't think she's nearly as political as some.
[00:31:39]  But that being said, you know, she feels like such an easy target because she's just, I don't know, she's obviously not that sophisticated when it comes to politics.
[00:31:49]  And she's, of course, going to side with the liberal Democrats, even though they're destroying our country.
[00:31:55]  You are a little muted on this as well.
[00:31:58]  Am I wrong?
[00:31:59]  Do you agree?
[00:32:00]  Like, I mean, I think she deserves it.
[00:32:03]  We can't get it again.
[00:32:04]  Okay, let's lay it out.
[00:32:05]  Like, what?
[00:32:06]  How does she represent the themes of this year or this age?
[00:32:10]  Like, that is what they go for.
[00:32:11]  Like, who is the person who either is the most important person that year or who sort of captures what the dominant story of the year was?
[00:32:20]  So, yeah, it's like last year they gave it to Vladimir Zelensky.
[00:32:23]  Even if we disagree with funding Ukraine, made sense that he was picked.
[00:32:26]  Like, the invasion of Ukraine was by far the biggest thing of 2022.
[00:32:31]  You know, 2020, you have, you know, Joe Biden.
[00:32:34]  You have, they almost always give it to whoever wins the presidential election.
[00:32:39]  You know, they didn't have to.
[00:32:40]  Elon Musk has gotten it, right?

=== The Full George Santos Returns (03:00) ===

[00:32:41]  Yeah, he has two years ago, 21.
[00:32:43]  You know, in the 1960s, they didn't give it to the Beatles.
[00:32:47]  And to give it to Taylor Swift, because she's just a really popular celebrity who's made a lot of money is weird to me, especially because celebrities overall are less important than they've been in a long time.
[00:32:58]  It's way more decentralized.
[00:33:00]  I totally agree.
[00:33:01]  Like, we have more sources of entertainment with more options.
[00:33:05]  So, even if she's the most popular singer, songwriter in the world, she's not nearly as big a deal as the biggest singer-songwriter in the world would have been 50 years ago, 40 years ago, even 20 years ago, I'd say.
[00:33:19]  And especially when you already have just sitting there being enormous, like the most obvious pick for some sort of person of the year.
[00:33:28]  It's what's the biggest story of the year?
[00:33:29]  It's AI.
[00:33:30]  So, you either pick Sam Altman because he has Open AI, or you pick literally Chat GPT as the, you know, intelligence of the year.
[00:33:38]  Totally, I totally agree.
[00:33:39]  All right, so one of, you talked about intelligence.
[00:33:42]  I couldn't help but throw this one up.
[00:33:44]  Uh, let's play 144 just real quick here at the end.
[00:33:48]  144.
[00:33:50]  Hey, hey, George Santos here.
[00:33:53]  I'm so proud of you for coming out as a furry.
[00:33:56]  And I just wanted to tell you that your friends and family all accept you.
[00:34:02]  And they're all excited about your persona, which is awesome to be a Beavapus, a beaver, and a platter puss.
[00:34:11]  So let me tell you, they all love you, Beavapus.
[00:34:16]  Don't you ever get your head down.
[00:34:21]  Okay, so this is the newly expelled George Santos now doing, you know, pay for video here.
[00:34:28]  He's getting paid per video, and then he'll just read a script.
[00:34:31]  Yeah.
[00:34:32]  And now he's celebrating a furry.
[00:34:33]  Blake, you have something to say.
[00:34:35]  Well, it's just this is so avoidable.
[00:34:37]  All like, okay, George Santos is an embarrassment.
[00:34:40]  Really funny, but yeah, he probably shouldn't be in Congress.
[00:34:44]  All you had to do was wait 10 months.
[00:34:47]  He'd lose a primary, and then, you know, he'd lose.
[00:34:50]  He wasn't going to run again.
[00:34:51]  Yeah, he wasn't.
[00:34:51]  He wasn't going to run.
[00:34:52]  And then he'd leave, and he's under indictment for a million things.
[00:34:54]  Okay, just leave.
[00:34:55]  And they're like, no, we have to show a principle.
[00:34:57]  We have to expel him.
[00:34:58]  We don't expel people for anything.
[00:35:01]  I don't, he's the first one we've done in ages.
[00:35:03]  We've had congressmen get caught with money in their fridge and they didn't get expelled.
[00:35:07]  And we've had really horrifying affairs.
[00:35:11]  Barney Frank ran a Bordello out of his apartment.
[00:35:14]  No, I totally.
[00:35:15]  Well, but this shows that we will now get the full George Santos.
[00:35:19]  We're getting the full, America is now forced to get the full George Santos, like completely unleashed, unfettered, and we are all going to be dumber and worse off for it.
[00:35:28]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[00:35:30]  If you have not gotten your tickets to Amfest yet, go to Amfest.com.
[00:35:33]  Until next time, talk to you soon.
[00:35:37]  For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.