GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy joins Charlie to discuss the next GOP debate, performing mass executions on Hamas, and the most important question of all - does Governor Ron DeSantis wear HEELS?Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Charlie Kirk Show Intro
00:01:50
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| Hey everybody, it's And the Charlie Kirk Show. | |
| Vivek Ramaswamy joins the program. | |
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| Joining us now is Vivek Ramaswamy running for President of the United States. | |
| Vivek, welcome. | |
| Foreign policy is in the news. | |
| There are some not-so-covered angles of what's happening globally right now. | |
| You've been mentioning them, including Venezuela, Cuba, China, and Azerbaijan. | |
| Tell us about it. | |
| Well, look, I mean, for all the people who are talking about Russia's good versus evil battle in Ukraine, invading regions of the Donbass, and I reject that characterization of good versus evil. | |
| Just because Putin is bad doesn't mean Ukraine is good. | |
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Global Conflicts and Homeland Security
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| But one of the things that I've called out in the hypocrisy of the media and the political class chattering about this is their total silence on Azerbaijan's incursions into the Nagorno-Karabakh region, where Armenian Christians have lived for a long time, since 1994 has been internationally recognized as a boundary, driving them out. | |
| Charlie, this isn't some time in the distant past. | |
| This is last month, in the month of September, where you don't hear a peep about it. | |
| And the reason I think is clear. | |
| I mean, there are certain groups that are politically popular, certain ones that aren't. | |
| And right now, Christians aren't a popular group. | |
| So that's a region, certainly with the media. | |
| It's not an area that they decide to pay attention to, even as they'll talk endlessly about Ukraine, which happens to be a nation that, who would have guessed, is also persecuting Christians. | |
| And so I tend to focus on areas where others aren't focused. | |
| I tend to hate saying things when others are already saying them. | |
| Yes, I wrote Woke Inc. at a time where no one was talking about those issues. | |
| Now every Republican candidate wants to have a pissing contest over who's more anti-woke, and that's fine. | |
| I share my convictions, but I don't like to repeat what others are repeating. | |
| When it comes to foreign policy, it's the same way for me is that let's talk about what nobody else is talking about. | |
| Now, I also have different views on how to deal with brewing conflict in the Middle East, how to bring the Ukraine war to a close. | |
| My view is there's no point in just saying what everybody else is saying. | |
| Let's talk about actual dimensions that get us to truth. | |
| So let's play Cut 8. | |
| You made some news at the Republican Jewish Coalition. | |
| Let's play Cut 8. | |
| I would love nothing more than for the IDF to put the heads of the top 100 Hamas leaders on stakes and line them up on the Israel-Gaza border as a sign that October 7th, 2023 will never happen again. | |
| And then to use all of those saved resources to build the border defenses of the future. | |
| But that is Israel's decision to make, not ours. | |
| That is what David Ben-Gurion would tell Israel to do. | |
| That is what George Washington would tell the United States to do. | |
| Elaborate more, Vivek Ramaswamy. | |
| Yep. | |
| So I am all in for Israel pursuing an Israel-first agenda. | |
| And the U.S. job as an ally is to make sure that Israel has a diplomatic iron dome protecting them from the U.N. or anybody else, stopping them from doing what they need to do to defend their own country. | |
| Israel is our most important ally in the Middle East. | |
| It is also not our 51st state. | |
| And my view is that it's the U.S. job to, yes, keep our pre-existing commitments. | |
| I will always stand by our commitments, the $3 plus billion dollars per year in aid that we send to Israel. | |
| But I do not want to get involved, the U.S. involved militarily in this war either. | |
| My ultimatum to Iran would be, you stay out, we stay out. | |
| The IDF can get its job done. | |
| And yes, I'm rooting for Israel's success. | |
| What Hamas did to Israel was subhuman. | |
| It was medieval. | |
| Israel is our friend and ally in the Middle East, and we support them as a friend and ally diplomatically and intelligence sharing and otherwise. | |
| But I don't want to get us, the United States of America, if I'm the president, that's where my moral obligation is, into another prolonged no-win war in the Middle East. | |
| And Charlie, what I see in the GOP today is it's Dick Cheney 2.0 all over again, trying to take this party over again. | |
| And in many ways, it's Dick Cheney 2.0 and the Republican Party that's even worse than some of the Democrats. | |
| So forget the partisan filters. | |
| They took us, and it's people my age that went and died, thousands of them, in Iraq and Afghanistan, to what end? | |
| It's the Taliban still in charge 20 years later, for God's sake, a hostile anti-American regime in Iraq. | |
| $7 trillion of our $33 trillion national debt today to be borne by the next generation due to those two wars alone. | |
| So no, that's not going to happen on my watch. | |
| And I think that's the actual choice in this GOP primary. | |
| Do you want to go the way of the past? | |
| Do you want Dick Cheney 2.0 escalating in this case potentially to World War III because we got Russia-Ukraine going on at the same time while Russia and China are in military alliance with one another? | |
| Do you want World War III? | |
| Do you want to be taken there by people like the Nikki Haleys of the world who will make money doing it? | |
| The bombs explode, their bank account grows. | |
| Do you want to go that direction of the past? | |
| Or do you want to go the direction of the future, which I think is America first that is far bigger than just the Republican Party and excludes much of the Republican Party in it too, which is why I could care less for the Republican versus Democrat debate on this issue. | |
| Yeah, the consensus in the Republican primary absent Donald Trump is invade the world, invite the world. | |
| And Nikki Haley is clamoring to get us into another war with Iran. | |
| You have been morally clear with the Russian-Ukrainian war. | |
| And so, Vivek, you've been more and more vindicated with that as we continue onward. | |
| It is a tragedy and honestly a slaughter of the Ukrainian people. | |
| I don't know if you saw the recent Time magazine piece, Vivek. | |
| It's sad and depressing and really heavy, what is happening in Ukraine, all preventable. | |
| Talk about the contrast between your vision for America First foreign policy and the other people running for the presidency, absent Donald Trump, that want more money, more arms. | |
| In fact, even Mike Pence, before he dropped out, he visited Ukraine, a meat grinder basically for nothing. | |
| Yeah, so I think there's two America First candidates in this race, and we can talk about distinctions there. | |
| But the real deep divide in the GOP is Donald Trump and myself are America First candidates. | |
| Everybody else is a neocon looking for Dick Cheney 2.0. | |
| And it's a worldview that's different. | |
| So I'm not just going to criticize it. | |
| One worldview is that it's America's job to be a hegemon, and part of being a hegemon means that you have to make moral judgments elsewhere and use the U.S. military to enforce those moral judgments. | |
| That's a neutral description. | |
| That's what they would say. | |
| That's a view I disagree with. | |
| My view is different. | |
| I'll give you an analogy. | |
| I'm a father. | |
| I have two sons. | |
| My moral obligation as a father is to my family, period. | |
| My moral obligation as the next president is exclusively to the citizens of this country. | |
| Period. | |
| That's it. | |
| Not some other country, not some other nation, not some nebulous global citizenship. | |
| It is to this nation, the citizens here in our homeland, the United States of America. | |
| And so, my view is I look at every conflict differently through that prism. | |
| The Ukraine conflict doesn't advance that interest. | |
| It's not advancing any U.S. interest. | |
| It's driving Russia further into China's arms. | |
| I don't think we should be sending more money to Ukraine. | |
| I think it is a kleptocracy. | |
| The irony now is it's not even helping the objectives that we said it was helping. | |
| Some mid-level Ukrainian bureaucrats able to buy a bigger house because we sent money over there. | |
| That's what we're now seeing: it's a total kleptocracy. | |
| We knew it beforehand. | |
| Now we know it on our own dime. | |
| And then the irony is, even for the good versus evil crowd in Ukraine, and I think that's different in the Hamas versus Israel conflict. | |
| I think there is a right side and a wrong side of this. | |
| On the Ukraine version of this, just because Putin is bad doesn't mean that Ukraine is good, some paragon of democracy. | |
| It's not. | |
| It's a country that's banned 11 opposition parties. | |
| The leader celebrates Nazis in his own ranks, goes after Christians in his own country, says he won't hold elections this year unless the U.S. forks over more money, consolidates all media into one state TV media arm. | |
| Anybody ever asked the question of why Russia had such an easy time in eastern Ukraine, but not other parts of Ukraine? | |
| Because the parts of eastern Ukraine that they occupy in the Donbas are Russian-speaking regions that haven't been represented in the Ukrainian parliament for nearly 10 years, so there was no counter-resistance. | |
| So these are hard facts in the Russia-Ukraine case that make that one easy. | |
| In the Israel case, what Hamas did to Israel absolutely, I do think, is an example of good versus evil, evil versus good. | |
| Hamas's attack on Israel was subhuman. | |
| And I think we should diplomatically, absolutely stand with Israel in intelligence sharing and keep our prior pre-existing commitments. | |
| But through an America-first lens, I think it's wrong. | |
| If you're going to call that an attack on America, as other politicians have, if you don't know what an attack on America is, you have no business being in the leadership of America because when those kind of people lead America, that's exactly when you are going to get an attack on America. | |
| We need to use that as a reminder to protect our own homeland because if that can happen in Israel, that can happen here in the United States too, especially when you have leaders who are asleep at the switch that are in charge focused on other conflicts except for our own homeland here at home. | |
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Republican Debates and Accountability
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| So that's the way I look at it. | |
| It is a deep divide in the GOP today. | |
| It is the defining divide. | |
| Everything else, you know, everybody agrees that guys shouldn't be competing with women in sports competitions. | |
| Great. | |
| Got that. | |
| I'm on board for that too. | |
| I was early in talking about those issues. | |
| Fine. | |
| We got that. | |
| Let's talk about where we actually disagree. | |
| And I do think it's on the vision for America's role and the use of American resources and lives in the world. | |
| And I think we have a deep divide and we need to sort it out. | |
| Okay, Vivek, I got to play a piece of tape. | |
| One of my favorite guys out there, Patrick Bett David, is going viral. | |
| He's trying to get down to the heart of the matter here. | |
| Play Cut 46. | |
| I'm sure your marketing team points out how they're trying to troll you in the marketplace. | |
| Okay, I'm sure they're doing that. | |
| Can you bring this one clip? | |
| I know you were on, what do you call it? | |
| On what was it? | |
| Bill Maher. | |
| And Bill Maher talked about the boots. | |
| I've seen you walk with these boots. | |
| Go ahead and play this clip. | |
| This on TikTok went viral. | |
| It doesn't have a million views. | |
| It doesn't have, you know, 10 million views. | |
| This thing's got 1.2 million likes. | |
| And some people are wondering, how do they? | |
| I don't even understand. | |
| I haven't seen that. | |
| They've not shown this to you. | |
| Okay, what they're trying to say with this is that in your boots, you have heels. | |
| No, no, no, no. | |
| Those are just standard, off-the-rack. | |
| Lucchese. | |
| How tall are you? | |
| How tall are you, Governor? | |
| How tall? | |
| 5'11? | |
| Okay. | |
| Why don't you wear tennis shoes and dress shoes? | |
| That is Ron DeSantis and Patrick Bett David. | |
| Vivek, have you noticed something recently? | |
| Well, I mean, I wasn't going to bring this up myself, but I did get a kick out of it when I saw that video. | |
| I did notice that Ron had certainly different shoes when I saw him at the debate stage than I'm accustomed to seeing normally. | |
| So I will just say it stood out to me, but I chose not to comment on it. | |
| It's not typically my style. | |
| Focus on the issues is where I go. | |
| But yeah, I think that I thought he grew a little bit since I had seen him a couple of years ago. | |
| But I leave each person to make their own sartorial choices to themselves. | |
| I have a lot of criticisms and differences on policy, but that wasn't one of the places where I was going to hit him. | |
| A late bloomer. | |
| So, Vivek, talk about the race. | |
| How are you feeling? | |
| The field is narrowing. | |
| You know, the message, you have been very precise on America First type mantras and policies. | |
| There's a debate coming up with NBC, and I know you're going to handle it, but it drives me nuts that the RNC is doing something with NBC. | |
| Why wouldn't they have a debate, I don't know, with Steve Banner or Tucker Carlson or Megan Kelly? | |
| So I want you to comment on that, Vivek, because you'll be fine. | |
| You'll joust great with Kristen Welker and Lester Holt and Hugh Hewitt, who's a great friend. | |
| I'm glad he's involved, so I exempt Hugh from that. | |
| Hugh's amazing. | |
| But the NBC is a complete waste of time. | |
| Vivek, how's the race going? | |
| And your thoughts on the enemy, NBC News, moderating a debate? | |
| I think it's good. | |
| It's thinning out. | |
| I think it's a good thing that Mike Pence is out. | |
| Frankly, if you want the old version of the neocon worldview, there's plenty of choices in this race. | |
| Pence was there. | |
| Scott, Christie, Haley could go straight down the list. | |
| I don't think people need four or five or six of those choices. | |
| One is plenty. | |
| One of those choices in the race is probably plenty of representative. | |
| And so I think that Mike Pence did a good thing for the country by getting the heck out of the race. | |
| And I think that others could probably do well to follow his lead. | |
| My view on the debate is: look, they've been pretty lame so far in the way they've been done. | |
| And I hope a thinned field allows me to really ask the questions that nobody else is asking. | |
| If the moderators aren't going to do it, I'm going to get in there and do the job myself of smoking out where this deep ideological divide is on whether we want to send our sons and daughters to fight other people's wars and rack up national debt doing it or not. | |
| And I hope it's not some sort of virtue signaling fest where we're all just competing on who's actually saying the easy thing we all agree on in a more indignant way. | |
| No, I think that the other candidates deserve to be held account to account. | |
| I want to talk about corruption in politics. | |
| That's something that we don't talk about enough. | |
| And the Republican Party, I think, frankly is not that much better than the opposition here. | |
| I think the Republican Party has gotten in the way of actually having open debates. | |
| You know, when I was called to spar with Chris Christie, I said I would do it. | |
| If I want to spar with RFK or a different candidate, I'm happy to do it. | |
| But the Republican Party's gotten in the way in saying that the rules don't really apply to allowing for inter-candidate debates. | |
| I just don't think that's productive. | |
| And frankly, I'm going to check out how this one goes, and then I'll make decisions about future debates after that, whether it's useful. | |
| I think Tucker would be an awesome moderator. | |
| I think it's a great idea. | |
| I mean, again, the RNC is a good idea. | |
| I think you and Tucker. | |
| Well, you and Tucker should do one of the debates. | |
| Actually, why not? | |
| You're very kind, buddy. | |
| Two generations. | |
| Yeah, what I told you. | |
| Sounds good to me. | |
| What I told the RNC is: listen, guys, instead of this NBC thing, okay, turning point action, they don't want to work with us, obviously, but they can't stand us. | |
| But I said, listen, you know, we come in, we have Bannon or Bongino, Walz. | |
| Yeah, it'd be good too. | |
| You know, whatever. | |
| You could have different flavors. | |
| You could have Shapiro, who's great, but more neoconservative than I am on foreign policy stuff. | |
| But that's fine. | |
| But why don't you have, I just, I don't understand. | |
| You have a Republican primary. | |
| Why don't you have leading media figures, Glenn Beck, any one of these people, right? | |
| And you have a series of these forums or debates. | |
| I don't care what Lester Holt has to say. | |
| Final thoughts, Vivek. | |
| So, look, I actually think that you raise a pretty interesting point where we should have multiple perspectives across the conservative movement challenging candidates. | |
| That's the point. | |
| And I do think that the real issue that I have with it narrowly is the last debate from the Reagan Library, the way that was hosted versus the next one. | |
| The candidates aren't really being challenged on the one wedge that matters, which comes down to foreign policy. | |
| Do you believe in these foreign wars and World War III or not? | |
| So you basically have a pro-war establishment. | |
| Of course. | |
| Even the conservatives doing this and it's wrong. | |
| Neoliberals from the Baker are doing great. | |
| Thanks so much for listening. | |
| Everybody, email us as alwaysfreedom at charliekirk.com. | |
| Thanks so much for listening, and God bless. | |
| For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com. | |