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April 26, 2025 - The Charlie Kirk Show
57:51
THOUGHTCRIME Ep. 81 — Money For Moms? Dark Woke? AI Factories?

Charlie, Jack, Tyler, and Blake dig into the week's biggest topics, including: -Are $5,000 baby bonuses a worthwhile way to boost America’s birthrate?-Are American young people too clueless to hold a factory job?-What the heck is “dark woke?”Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, everybody.
Our baby bonus is a good idea.
Can you imagine that we have an AI factory?
And finally, we dive into Dark Woke.
What exactly is that?
Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Get involved with Turning Point USA at tpusa.com.
That is tpusa.com.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country.
He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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Okay, everybody, happy thought crime.
Thursday, we are here with Blake, with Tyler, and is Jack in the community?
Yes, he is.
The community?
What community is that?
This is the community of thought criminals.
The Maryland man community.
The community of thought criminals.
Everyone's a community now.
You get a community and you get a community!
That sounds like a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
So we now know the community of thought criminals.
Yes.
It's great.
We see this with intelligence community.
I think they were one of the first.
We need to get deeper into that.
The oil and gas community.
The criminal community.
Everything's a community now.
What is our first topic?
Our first topic is baby bonuses, Charlie.
So this came up earlier this week.
It's sort of just reporting on different...
Rumors and ideas under consideration in the White House, but basically the White House is considering how do we encourage people to have children?
How do we raise America's average number of kids per family?
And one of the ideas that was thrown out was to have a $5,000 baby bonus for every American mother after she gives birth.
They asked Trump about it on Tuesday and he responded, sounds like a good idea to me.
But is it a good idea, Charlie?
I don't know.
Jack, what do you think?
So yeah, this is one of those things where, you know, it's been tried in Poland.
It's been tried in Hungary.
I want to say other parts of Asia may have tried this.
And it's really seen limited success.
There's still been issues with the birth rates in many of these countries.
And also, you know, I'm just going to say it, America has more of an issue.
With, you know, sort of the baby mama syndrome than some of these other, you know, Eastern European countries do.
And I worry that if you don't put the right kind of conditions on something like this, then you just kind of create that situation all over again.
Yeah, so I think Hungary has actually stabilized the decline, if I'm not mistaken.
It's gone up, so I'm looking at the numbers right in front of me right now.
They spend, I think, 7% of GDP on pro-family policy.
I mean, it's an extraordinary investment.
They measure it.
They have a whole bureau of it in Hungary.
It is a robust martial plan.
And there's playgrounds everywhere.
When you go around in Budapest, it's like every corner there's a new playground or something's going on, and they have kids' sections in the restaurant in Poland as well.
It's amazing to see what a pro-family country, like a pro-child country, actually looks like.
And then you start asking questions about ourselves.
Like, wait a minute.
Is our country pro-family or are we actually kind of like an anti-child country?
And because in many ways, we don't make accommodations for children in this country.
Now, what I would like to flag, though, is...
So, I'm looking at...
I just sent you a chart.
You guys a chart.
So, we've got...
I just plugged in Hungary fertility rate.
Fertility rate is average number of births per woman.
And it auto-generated with the magic of AI.
It gave us a chart for Hungary.
It gave us one for Poland.
And it gave us one for Czechia, the Czech Republic.
And it's worth looking at this where Hungary is actually...
So they bottomed out in 2010 at about 1.23.
That's very low.
And they've raised it.
They got it up to about 1.61 right when COVID hit.
And it dropped off to 1.52 in 2020.
There's some fluctuation.
It's a slight increase.
It has gone up, but it's worth flagging...
But they stopped the decrease.
Yeah, but it's worth flagging...
They're consistently, over the past decade, they're consistently behind Czechia.
And that's an interesting comparison because the Czechs are one of the least religious
Do they have Muslims?
They have Vietnamese, a few of them.
Yeah, it's an old communist Cold War thing.
They brought in North Vietnamese through an exchange program.
So you find these Vietnamese markets in the Czech Republic.
But so they just they have consistently been a bit ahead and they follow a very similar pattern, which is worth flagging.
They bottom out around the same point.
They similarly have a bit of a rise in the 2010s, and then they similarly fall right after COVID hits.
So Hungary did reverse their decline, but it's also worth saying, did they reverse the decline because of their policies, or is there a wider social thing going on?
I'm not sure if they border them, but they're very close to the Czechs, and culturally, historically, they have a lot of similar inputs going into that, and they're following a pretty similar pattern.
And I think with the 5,000 baby bonus, you kind of run into what I think is the reality, which is you can do things to encourage bigger families, but the stuff that you can do that would actually work, it's not within the Overton window of what a democracy could do.
If you gave women a million dollars per birth, just had a nationwide Elon Musk policy, it'd probably work.
But we couldn't do that.
Hungary has new things they've done, too.
You know they have no income tax at all for any woman that has babies?
If you have more than three kids, I think you pay no tax for the rest of your life.
You should do that.
We should do that.
We just have to cut spending.
Well, okay.
I'm just saying, you know, you're going to get different.
You're going to get different outcomes than Hungary will.
Well, yeah, you're going to get different outcomes.
But here's what I think.
I think we should do things that are pro.
We talked about this before.
I think maybe on here it was talking about getting rid of taxes on costs for moms.
So diapers, things like that.
I think that's been proposed.
I'm not mistaken.
But that type of work, too, is like, I mean, there's things that you can do in addition to a bonus, the baby bonus, just like straight cash.
Because I think the straight cash, I don't know if there's anyone that's done extensive research on that.
But the street cash does seem like it's a really bad idea.
Yeah, well, and it's kind of the line is $5,000.
Like, you think, who is the person you're envisioning who is tipped into having an additional kid by a one-time bonus of $5,000?
And to be blunt, it's probably not the sort of kids that we need to have more of.
Because what's really hollowing out in the U.S. and what's really driving the birth rate down is...
People who are in what you might say like the responsible middle class are the ones who feel the most constricted about having kids.
People on the lowest end somewhat impulsively have kids and they don't work terribly hard at raising them.
And people who are very, very high income, making multiple millions of dollars a year, can effectively afford to have as many kids as they want.
And they actually do have more kids as a result.
But I think the absolute rock bottom of fertility, the people who have the lowest number of kids, are people who are maybe 75th, 80th percentile in income, where they're the ones who care a lot about having kids responsibly.
Okay, don't...
Don't have kids until you get married and make sure you can give each of them the lifestyle that you think a kid should have and you can give them the proper amount of resources.
Those are the ones who are at absolute rock bottom.
Those are the ones who you would want presumably to raise the most to because those are the kids who kind of make your country able to succeed.
It is a problem in America if the upper middle class specifically cannot reproduce itself.
If it's going extinct, you are burning up the human capital of your country when people who make the best parents, probably, are not having kids anymore.
I mean, I do respect, first of all, President Trump embracing this because we should want another baby boom.
I want to just read off some things, though, to defend Hungary, though.
Abortions went down 41% since their pro-family policy, 41%.
That's a big deal.
Marriage rates nearly doubled since 2010.
The fertility rate was at its lowest at 1.23, you're right.
Then it's about 1.5, but it's still below replacement level.
So we'll see if it can climb up there.
Overall, I think something should be tried because we are seeing a massive population collapse, a fertility crisis in the West.
Does anyone else have any other ideas?
So one thing that's interesting, a country that's not a democracy...
China, actually.
So China's famous for the one-child policy.
The one-child policy is dead.
It has been for a while.
So for a long time, the assumption of Chinese authorities was, okay, we had this one-child policy because we were overpopulated.
You had to get the birth rate down, they believed.
And so they thought, oh, as soon as we get rid of this, it'll just come back, is what they thought.
And what made them freak out is they started dialing back the one-child policy, and there was no rise.
There was no actual increase in childbirths.
Instead, they looked over, and they were following the same path as South Korea, where South Korea is at 0.7.
You're talking Koreans ceasing to exist as an ethnic group in 100 years at that sort of birth rate.
And so China is also introducing a lot of stuff to encourage this, and they're not a democracy, so they can be more aggressive.
And you see things like you just have the government come out and really...
We're going to promote this marriage and childbirth culture.
And they're also targeting things.
One thing we've noticed in the West is people aren't pairing off as easily.
People aren't going out.
They're not meeting people as much.
So China does things like they say...
Kids are staying inside and they're playing too many video games.
Okay, we're going to make it so kids can only play video games for three designated hours of the week.
I don't know how strictly it's enforced, but in 2021 they had a law where if you're under 18, I think, basically you could do it, I'm not sure the exact time, but it was one hour on Friday night, one hour on Saturday, one hour on Sunday night.
And that's when you're allowed to play online video games in China if you're not an adult.
They had a huge video game addiction problem in China, too.
This was something where they even had rehab centers where families could send their kids because they were too addicted to online games.
And I don't mean like you're playing on your phone a little bit.
Kids would die in South Korea.
There were kids that would literally die from malnourishment.
So it's really interesting.
I looked this up.
What do you guys think the birth rate, the fertility rate for white women in America is?
The nationwide one is like 1.6, I think.
So I'd say probably 1.4.
Yeah, it's 1.51, which amazingly is not that far off from Hungary with all of these policies.
Yeah.
It's actually kind of miraculous.
You look at this.
Now, Hispanic women by far have the highest fertility rate.
Then black women, then white women.
Is Hispanic like two and a half?
Yeah, so the way that they...
This is a separate index, but Hispanic women is 64.4 per 1,000.
I don't really know how they tabulate it.
That's like the crude birth rate.
Yeah, so the most fertile is Hispanic women.
No surprise there.
Then black women, and then white women are basically tied.
And then by far the least, and you had to explain this one, but it goes back, is Asians.
Asians by far have the least amount of kids.
Well, Asians are, in the U.S., they're higher income.
They're more urbanized.
They're tracking what is happening in Asian countries as well.
I remember that, though, in elementary school.
I always remember all my Asian friends were only children.
Maybe they had a brother or sister.
Almost always.
It's got to be a cultural thing.
I will say, though, just anecdotally, though, I will say that the most, I think that having more kids is coming back in style with the more Christian you are.
At least anecdotally, would you agree, Jack, that there is a three-plus push?
And maybe, again, full disclosure, I very well might just be around wealthy people that can afford having three, four, five kids, but...
Unfortunately, having children has become a luxury item.
Let me say it this way.
Having more than two kids is a luxury item in America.
It is expensive.
It's objectively expensive.
And it takes a lot of time.
But Jack, I am seeing a resurgence where I think that the baby boomers, I'm a child of baby boomers, it was like, I'll have one of each.
Where now it's like, no, I might have two, three, four, or even five.
Go ahead.
One of the, I guess, thought crimes on this could also be that the...
The math for both parents working actually drops off as you increase children, right?
So having one kid in daycare, okay, not super expensive.
Now all of a sudden you've got two kids in daycare.
Now it is getting really expensive.
Three kids, four kids.
Now wait a minute.
You have all these kids in daycare.
Suddenly you're spending more on daycare than that second daycare.
You know, job that second income for a dual income household actually brings in.
So suddenly you're saying, wait, wait a second.
Is this sort of like a dual income trap?
Because we both want to go out of the house and work, but we're actually not making enough money to have this many kids.
Why would we be able to do that if we want to have more kids?
You know what I'm saying?
So it actually prevents you from having more kids because of the exorbitant cost of daycare.
And so that's why J.D. Vance talked about this at great length during the campaign, as we all know, that that's why to him...
Making it so that you could live as a family on a single income would actually help better for family formation because then you've got one parent that can stay home with multiple children.
You don't have to put your kids into daycare because it isn't a situation where both parents are forced to work.
So for the last 2,000 years, there was an assumption that having children was something that everyone wanted.
There was an assumption that...
When in reality, it's not true.
It's that sex is what everyone would want, that children are actually a value.
You would think that the birth rate would have skyrocketed after COVID.
Everyone's sitting at home.
The birth rate went down after COVID, amazingly.
Having children is a value.
If you do not have a worldview...
We had a COVID baby.
Well, you had one, Jack?
We did too.
That's awesome.
We did have a COVID baby, yep.
If you do not have a worldview that prioritizes having children, your society will not have children.
Well, I think the biggest thing that would have driven it down during COVID is...
Most people have their children probably relatively early in their relationships.
They marry, they have their kids, and then 30 years after that, they raise those kids and grow old.
And what COVID really did is it exacerbated, I think, the biggest driver of this, which is people are not getting married.
People are not meeting each other.
People are not pairing off, as it were.
No, no, no.
Hear me out, though.
I'm saying, though, that we did not have a New York City blackout effect.
So there's almost a one-to-one, for example, when New York City would have a blackout.
Nine months later, there would be a slight increase in the fertility rate, right?
That during a blizzard in Chicago, nine months later, you would have a slight increase in the fertility rate.
People were locked down amongst one another for about 60 to 90 days minimum, and we saw no increase.
Wait, wait, is this why Charlie likes cold showers so much?
Charlie, is this why you like cold showers so much?
Is there like a connection here?
I think there's actually an explanation for that, though, Charlie.
Remember when we went through on here and we showed how people meet each other?
And because the online dating, there was nowhere for anyone to go.
So it used to be you would meet people and other things like that.
So now, unfortunately, a single parenthood is so high.
Fertility rates are not accompanied by marriage as much today.
You probably didn't have as much of it.
If COVID would have happened in the 50s, you probably would have seen a huge spike.
Without a doubt.
But now it's like people were basically trapped alone because they don't meet and they don't have meaningful relationships anyways.
And then plus the entire lobby that prevents pregnancy to begin with.
So will the baby boom work?
You know what's interesting about this, and I always talk about it, is do you guys remember the movie It's a Wonderful Life, like the Christmas movie, you know that one?
They go into, like, he, you know, I'm not going to read the whole thing, but it's like they go into the nightmare version of the world if George Bailey had never lived, and he goes into, he says, I want to see my wife, I want to see Mary, and he's being walked through, and it's sort of a Dickensian kind of take on things.
And they say, oh, you don't want to see your wife, George, you don't want to see what happened to Mary.
And he goes, what happened?
I need to see it, I need to see it.
And he goes, all right, fine, I'll show you, but it's really bad.
And he goes, George...
She's a spinster.
She never married.
She never had children.
She's closing up the local library and she's like in her 30s.
And so there's something that's changed in American culture where that was considered nightmarish and like incredibly backwards in the 1940s, you know, during World War Two, essentially.
And the word spinster, the idea of social shame around this was seen as a really, really bad outcome.
Whereas these days they say, oh, you know, go and get your master's in library affairs, go get your MLA or whatever.
And that's considered this great good.
And then they tell you to not even have kids.
You put off family formation until your 30s, late 30s, etc.
And suddenly we wonder why there's low fertility rates.
What policies would potentially work?
Again, I'm interested in some...
I think that if we can...
Okay, let's just...
If we can radically cut spending, right, then I would be open to the idea to say no income tax if you are married.
Now, understand Hungary also says you must remain married.
Not just have kids.
It is you are...
You stay in the marriage.
Yes.
Like, this is not just like baby mama stuff.
I mean, in terms of who we would want...
After your third year of marriage, you...
You get it.
Who we would want to have kids.
Imagine if you just radically increased the money, but it had to come with a low time preference for it.
We will give you $100,000 for a kid.
$150,000.
But it will only be five years from now, and you still have to be married.
You have to be married to the person when the child is born and married to the same person continuously.
You can't get married.
Or how about ten years?
Ten years is like a pension.
No, a pension.
A marriage pension.
You get it when you retire.
Something like that.
You want to actually emphasize giving it to low-time preference people.
People who will make good long-term decisions.
Because what we've seen is a lot of people have decided that the good long-term decision is not having kids.
But ultimately, anything that's reducing it to purely an economic thing, I think, is missing what drives this.
A lot of this is just...
A cultural value.
Man, I'm thinking of just the number of people I know.
That's what I'm trying to say with the movies.
Yeah, like the number of people I know who only have one kid or two kids basically just because the mom doesn't like having kids as much.
They're like, they didn't like being pregnant.
They don't want to be pregnant again.
One or two is enough.
And it was that gradual, I think it's a gradual transition.
I know among Mormons, you'll hear a lot where it's, okay, my grandparents had eight or nine kids apiece, my parents had four to six kids apiece, and now good Mormons are having two to three kids apiece, and maybe the next generation will be having zero to 1.8 kids apiece.
And it's that big, it's sort of the breakdown of what your normal environment is.
If everyone around you is normally having six kids, the normal thing to do is to have six kids and you see that gradual slide away.
So you'd almost have to say like in China where I mentioned where they're doing these things, a lot of what China does is just.
The person who has six kids is better than you.
The person who has the most kids is a better citizen than you are.
And if we're just wildly throwing around ideas that will never happen because we're not allowed to have cool ideas here.
You'd almost say, like, what if you could only vote if you were, like, if you are a married couple with a kid, you can vote and also vote your kids' vote, but actually you can't vote if you're just a single person.
Oh, you get an extra vote.
You get an extra vote.
And also, like, if you're not married, you can't vote.
Sorry, you're not a full citizen.
That would be an idea.
I love the extra vote idea.
It's sort of like, you know, in that old Heinlein novel, Starship, the actual book Starship Troopers.
Service means citizenship.
I'd love to see a map.
And citizenship requires service, whatever the slogan was.
It gets to be like...
Yeah, citizenship requires sex having.
Citizenship requires service, yeah.
And we know that married couples always tend to vote more conservative.
And certainly when people get older, as they have kids, they do tend to be more conservative.
So generally, as a movement, that is something that we should be pushing.
And also something that we should be pushing in terms of...
The country, we don't want to be a country where we're forced to hollow out our population replacement by replacing them with more immigrants, which is what we've been doing since the 1970s, essentially, and saying, oh,
well, who's going to do these jobs?
Let's open the floodgates.
That's created all these other problems, but my GDP go up, my shareholder value go up, and people are all upset about it.
This is also because, by the way, we now have a much lower trust.
So those social shaming campaigns don't necessarily work as well because we don't have a society that generally trusts the government and the institutions.
This is something that people attack us for all the time.
They say we are the cause of it, but no, we're not the cause of that.
Society is the cause of that.
That's why people don't trust anything.
That's why I don't trust institutions anymore.
And when you do have that more of a low-trust society, then guess what?
You're gonna have less kids.
Although, if I remember correctly, there is, and Blake, you probably know better than me, isn't there a correlation between birth rates going up and, like, warfare?
Probably historically.
I'm not sure about more recently.
Like, definitely that's an argument.
It's definitely an argument for why, for example, Israel has a notably high fertility rate.
I think they're still above three.
And some of that is they have ultra-Orthodox, but it's not just that.
Secular Jews have a high birth rate.
So let me ask you guys a question.
In the families where, let's just say, there's not as many kids, do you think the father wants more kids and the mom doesn't?
In my experience, the dad or the father kind of does want more kids, but obviously respects that it's both decisions.
The point being is, is motherhood a virtue that women care about anymore?
I can't say I don't.
It depends.
I've definitely seen the example of dad wants more and mom puts brakes on it, but I know more men than women.
I think that's a majority of the case.
And again, it's obviously both their decision.
I'm not even criticizing it.
But I hear from women on campus.
That's a better way.
Let me address it that way.
Women on campus think that motherhood is a great burden.
They think that if I have to go through it to get my genes, fine, continuing.
But it's really awful and it's really terrible.
Whereas the prior generation looked at it as something, not just something that they really should do to continue the species, but they get to do.
And there's a lot of reasons for that.
And I don't know.
I just think that...
Women right now think very negatively about pregnancy, and they think very negatively about motherhood.
Well, based off the outcomes that we've seen with the recent elections and the polling that's happening, that has to go hand in hand.
We look at white, middle-class, college-educated women have shifted so far left, and we know what their viewpoints are on family.
We know what their viewpoints are on...
You know, feminism.
We know what their viewpoints are on sexuality.
We know what their viewpoints are on conservative ideals, on religion.
They have to go hand in hand.
And so I think that's what's becoming more transparent in politics today is now that we're seeing very clearly, it's like, well, you know, if things are going wrong in America, you know, it's probably that one outlier category.
and the one outlier category that exists on every poll today is that it's white college-educated women are the ones that are so far distant from every single other category.
Even like...
Black females are closer to white men on ideology than white women are to white men on ideology.
That's crazy.
That alone is the thing that we probably don't talk about enough in reviewing the election and everything else.
That has a cultural effect that's so bad for...
I think white relationships.
And when you talk about Caucasian relationships in the United States, that's the fracturing of society.
And it would be no different than in a majority black community in Africa having such separation between female and males on something.
But we're talking about a complete ideological split between males and females happening in America right now that are white.
And so you cannot expect, I completely agree with you, I think it's men probably, not probably, are for sure the likely side that wants to have more kids than women because of the direction they're going.
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Let's go to the next topic.
Ah, how about the trolley problem?
We had very strong discussions of that.
This is a video out of Oakland.
Or do we want to talk about White Woke?
We could do one of those.
Do White Woke.
Oh, Dark Woke.
Dark Woke.
So, Dark Woke is the new neologism.
We discussed this on the show today.
So, it's basically they're like, these are your old Democrats.
These new Democrats are edgy and provocative and they say not nice things.
They are Dark Woke.
Yeah, this is their new wrinkle.
Yes, and so, like, the tape...
Let's play the tape here.
This is a new montage of Democrats embracing Dark Woke.
Play cut 289.
This is what kicking out of fascism looks like.
I think I could kick most of the...
I do think that.
Somebody slap me and wake me...
Because I'm ready to get on with it.
Total bull...
Absolute bull...
Once you get successful, don't be a greedy...
Pay your taxes.
If you could speak directly to Elon Musk, what would you say?
I guess dark woke is just that Democrats say swear words.
Just swearing all the time.
They said swear words before.
I guess they're just cursing.
Yeah.
They're literally just cursing.
That's all it is.
Okay, so we'll read from the New York Times articles.
This is the New York Times article.
This came out earlier this week.
And so this is one of the takes from Baviq Latia, a communications consultant with the Wisconsin Democrat Party.
Republicans have essentially put Democrats in a respectability prison.
There is an extreme imbalance in strategy that allows Republicans to say stuff that really...
I see this as a strategic shift within Democratic messaging.
I'm a big fan of Dark Woke.
And so is this like a playoff of Dark Brandon or something?
Or like Dark MAGA?
So Dark Brandon came out of Dark MAGA.
Please keep doing this.
I read it was a Dark Brandon.
Dark Brandon came after Dark MAGA, though.
So I think what they're trying to...
And I said this on the show.
They think that if they act kind of more like Trumpy, they're going to be okay.
But the laws of Trump do not apply to other people.
Yeah.
And I'm not even sure if the particular weird dark stuff has ever worked.
We were around in 2022.
There was Dark MAGA stuff.
And it didn't...
And as strongly as we kind of thought it would.
No, not at all.
Charlie, we're seeing this online.
So our team is actually seeing where the left is pushing Bernie Sanders and AOC as populists.
I've been predicting this the whole time.
So we're seeing this in multiple places.
Yesterday, actually, one of our staffers got in a debate with somebody about whether or not...
I can't remember where it was, but somebody posted, like, this is our brand of populism.
So I'll just admit, I just feel like I, like, this is one of those things where, do you ever feel now that you're over 30 that, like, you realize there's no new news stories?
Yeah, it's just kind of all repurposed.
So they're like, wow, the Democrats, like, now this new generation of Democrats, they're not afraid to be nasty.
Okay, in 2017, there was this whole pattern where they would go and find Trump admin officials in restaurants and scream at them until they had to leave.
Remember Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the chicken restaurant?
Yeah, it happened to her and it happened to a few others.
I think Ted Cruz got chased out of the restaurant.
I remember.
Was one of them a regular restaurant?
I remember.
I got chased out of Pennsylvania last year.
That was before everyone.
Tyler and I got chased out of a breakfast restaurant in Philadelphia with Candace Owens by Antifa at 7 a.m.
By the way, that's a...
What breakfast restaurant?
You know what?
I need to think.
It was really good, by the way.
It wasn't good.
Yeah, we had to leave our breakfast.
I know.
This is incredible.
Tyler had waffles or something.
I always eat waffles at that point in my life.
Admittedly, it's never happened to me.
I sometimes would visualize this.
When I was with Tucker, I was like, okay, what if I'm with Tucker and this happens?
The story was really funny.
I would just refuse to leave.
I would be like, I'm not leaving.
No, we did at first.
It became this whole thing.
Well, the funny part about this was this was like, you know, Candace had just barely become like kind of had some notoriety post the Kanye stuff.
So like nobody it wasn't like she was like a known household name at that point.
But what had happened was the place that we picked just happened.
It's Philadelphia, right?
It was at the end of their anti-police protest.
It was.
Yeah, they were just happened to rally Antifa like right outside our window.
And they were ending an all night.
They turned around and we're just like there.
They're like, wait, that's.
I think that's Charlie Craig.
You can see them looking it up on their phones.
They couldn't believe their luck that we happen to be eating breakfast right there.
It was Green Eggs Cafe.
Green Eggs Cafe, that's right.
By the way, I'm going back to Philadelphia, I think, later this week.
I have to stop by there.
I might go back.
That was a really good place.
Green Eggs Cafe on Locust.
I think they have a couple of them.
Those poor people were like, they were so nice.
Is it Locust Street or Dickens?
They have a couple.
No, it's definitely the one on Locust Street.
Were you in Center City?
It was right near the university.
It was right near the university, which would be, I think it was, regardless.
Which university, Temple?
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah, this is the one.
Yeah, Green Eggs Cafe.
It was Green Eggs Cafe, and it was delicious.
I gotta tell you.
Tyler, I think this is what you ordered.
This is literally what you ordered.
This is like this velvet pancake calorie.
I don't eat that now.
That looks disgusting.
No, Tyler ordered this.
It doesn't look like red velvet.
It looks like a chunk of flesh.
He ordered like a cake.
That looks like it was just cut out of a dead cow.
What in the world?
Yeah, this is it.
I'm looking right at it on the map.
It was right downtown there.
That's so funny.
And remember all the police officers were all black and all the Antifa people were white and they were like spitting and like getting up in your face.
All the black police officers were like they got involved and were like body slamming and they were like piping them down and everything.
It was so funny.
Yeah, Philly cops don't mess around.
Oh yeah, it was great.
So, for Dark Woke, what can we expect?
We could imagine things that have never happened before among Democrats.
They might target random people who aren't famous and just make giant villains of them on the internet and try to blow up their lives.
They could get people fired from their jobs because of things that they just said a decade ago.
There's like so many unprecedented things that Dark Woke could do, Charlie.
They could lock people up and deny them due process and deny them a hearing and file all sorts of extraneous charges on them for years until the Supreme Court finally steps in and shuts it down.
I mean, gosh, could you imagine?
Imagine if the Democrats started doing that.
They could kick you out of the military for not taking an experimental vaccine.
They could kick you out of polite society.
They could restrict your travel rights if you attended a protest and were there peacefully on January 6, 2021.
Could you imagine?
Could you imagine if they were censoring your free speech rights?
Could you imagine if they were kicking you, you know, taking your children away from you because you didn't want them to be transgenderized and they would put them into other states?
I think this is a—I will say that—I don't want to keep saying it.
I don't want to keep on giving Democrats advice.
Just do this.
I'm not going to tell you what to do.
Next segment.
All righty.
Okay, well now— And make Jasmine Crockett the face of it.
I literally—yeah, do that.
Show me where to donate.
I will raise you money, Jasmine Crockett.
We have a donor event next weekend.
I will raise you $10 million.
The Jasmine Crockett for presidency super PAC.
I will chair it.
Free of charge.
Don't make Jasmine Crockett the face of it.
Please, no.
Do the opposite.
Okay, I will not tell you my actual advice.
Next.
Okay, so now we're going into the Oakland thing already.
I need to get the number on that video.
But we discussed this.
So this happened in the Bay Area.
And we had a very strong reaction on Twitter about it.
It's a clip just to set up what people are going to see or hear.
It's a guy who apparently fell onto the tracks in Oakland, and no one helps him out.
We've got to also talk about the Florida State shooter with the Starbucks.
Okay, we'll get to both of those.
Let's do the Oakland one first.
We'll get to that.
Let's first do number 300.
Play that, please.
Get out!
This is my contribution.
So did he die?
No, he got him out.
He finally crawled himself.
The train stopped.
Miraculously.
But this is a bad trend.
It's a homeless life.
Fair Area TV!
Hey, me!
I'm on the offering now boarding, flat 43.
Homeless white guy.
Now...
I think you even see him.
He kind of gets out there.
Yeah, he finally gets out.
And he's like, why did you guys help me?
Well, so a thing you can clearly tell looking at him is he's clearly not well at all.
No, he's a drug addict.
Yeah, he's clearly high as a kite.
What I would say is, kind of my take is, trying to help him would be a heroic thing, but I sort of can't blame people for not immediately taking action.
At that moment where he's floundering, I don't know if I agree.
You could stick out one hand.
It's so easy to get pulled in, though.
That guy's pretty big.
I'm 200 pounds.
I disagree, though.
I think one hand...
You could also really...
If he's trying to pull you in, like...
Well, so you know how they train with, like, lifeguards, for example, with drowning victims?
You have to hit them.
Well, yeah, but also, like, you do not go try to save someone from drowning.
If you are not ironclad certain, you will not drown yourself.
Like, if you have a flotation device that you can be tethered to, if you can have, like...
Or, like, it's good to throw something, but, like, you generally, they say, you do not jump in after a drowning victim.
Okay, then how about this?
Because you will just drown.
Do you film this?
Yeah, that's probably bad.
The universal practice of just pulling out.
I don't think we know enough in the video to say whether or not what we would have done.
I think the gut reaction of filming it is morbid.
I think the video, if I'm not mistaken, maybe I'm wrong.
I haven't watched it since we dropped in the chat.
I think that people are kind of jeering him a little bit, aren't they?
Aren't they jeering at him a little bit?
I wouldn't say.
I think people are shouting.
I highly doubt anyone.
I don't think anybody was like, oh my gosh, no, you can do it.
That's the other thing, too.
You could be running up to him and be like, I can't grab you, but come on, just put your leg up.
Giving him instructions.
Nobody was even trying to help the guy.
They were kind of mocking him a little bit with the video.
It is a bad trend we are seeing.
Where people are just filming bad stuff that's happening.
By the way, did we ever find out the person who at Florida State University was the person with the Starbucks with that girl that got shot?
I don't think we do.
We have that by the way now, too.
How did that not become a multiple-day national news story, by the way?
It's only B-roll.
Let's play 314.
The memory holding of this is really creepy and bizarre.
So here's what's happening.
On podcasts, there's a person sipping a Starbucks, filming while one of her classmates is shot, on the ground dying, and she's filming it.
With Starbucks in hand.
Sipping it.
Literally just took a drink of Starbucks next to this.
And more shots are going off in the background.
What's so bizarre about this to me is I feel like I would be running for my life in the shooting.
This whole thing, this is one of the weirdest.
I thought it was AI.
I thought this was fake.
Yeah, I remember you said that.
This is not real.
No one knows who this person is.
This is a very disturbing trend.
And in both these cases, thankfully they lived.
There's going to be somebody that dies and someone just films it the entire time.
They just film it.
That's right.
Well, I actually follow a whole Reddit about this.
No, you follow this weird, dark stuff.
They die in elevators.
Yeah, a little bit.
He really does.
Tyler is constantly, like, there should be a new thing.
Every time I get an elevator now, I'm like, oh, Tyler thinks I'm going to die or something.
I'm telling you, elevators, you could die.
You could die.
It's just not good.
You have to know the ways that...
You said that to me the other day when I tried to call you.
This is why.
It is interesting that we don't seem to know who it came from.
Because presumably, like most of these videos, these are only available because someone uploaded it.
It's from their own phone.
It's very brief.
So you almost wonder, like, did someone act like...
You know, on Facebook, you can just go live?
You almost wonder, did someone accidentally tap the go live button and then un-live themselves?
And now it's become this huge thing.
So that's why we were discussing it, like, how should we blow it up more?
And I was saying, I'm always very wary of taking any four-second clip and exploding it, because the truth is, you don't know what's going on before that video or after that video.
But it is very odd.
I'd say the biggest, easiest takeaway is the automatic impulse of anything is happening.
I'm going to pull out my phone and record it.
And it gets two different angles.
Not helping someone when you should help them, but also recording when you really should be exercising basic self-preservation.
Because you get people who obviously are putting themselves in danger or actively inhibiting an evacuation or something that needs to be done because they're just recording it with their phone.
It's a very jarring...
Modern reality.
Well, this is why I was saying I read it.
I follow this one thing called Why Were They Filming?
And it's all a bunch of like, why does this person have their phone out and filming what's going on?
And they catch crazy stuff that happens on there.
There is, I think, an entire...
I think these people, it's like almost video game-esque, where they don't have any fear for their life.
They don't have any fear for...
Maybe they feel so valueless that they're...
Their only value is what they capture on their phone, like the same way what they ingest on their phone?
I was just going to say, no, I would disagree with that in a sense that I don't think it's that it's internalized.
I don't think they're internalizing anything.
I think that because it's the algorithm, right?
The algorithm rewards.
And dopamine rewards, whatever goes viral, whatever's the hottest thing, whatever's the next content.
So because all of us have social media, I'm sure we're all victims of it here or guilty of it here.
Even Blake is a TikTok star.
And, you know, we all think like, okay, hey, this is going to be great content.
This is going to be great content.
So we've actually sort of...
We've detached ourselves from reality in the sense that we don't experience reality anymore.
We're constantly thinking, and everyone is doing it now, we're constantly thinking, oh, how is this going to look on the gram?
How is this going to look on Twitter?
How is this going to look on, you know, whatever your social media choice is?
And so rather than Rather than directly interface with that, we always take that extra step back to think, how will others look at this if we then go and film it?
So I think we've rewired all of people's brains.
This is why I talk about the generations that grew up with technology are just fundamentally different.
Yeah, just the blurring of the lines between the two, right?
Yeah.
It's just remarkable, truly.
Y-R-E-F-Y has been the sponsor of this incredibly viral campus tour.
Private student loan debt in America totals about $300 billion.
About $45 billion of that is labeled as distressed.
Y-R-E-F-Y refinances distressed or defaulted private student loans that others won't touch.
Y-R-E-F-Y does not care what your credit score is.
Go to Y-R-E-F-Y.com, call 888-Y-R-E-F-Y-34, or log on to Y-R-E-F-Y.com.
Can you imagine being debt free and being unburdened by what has been bad credit is accepted?
Do you have a co-borrower?
Why refi can get them released from the loan?
You can give mom or dad a break.
You can even skip a payment every six months of the 12 times.
Okay, we have one last time for one last topic.
Alrighty, so this is the, uh, it's a factory that they just built in China.
And what's special about this factory, let me see if I can get it here, is it apparently can be run entirely without any humans whatsoever, and it can build one smartphone every second.
What's the number on that one, guys?
I'm trying to find it on this chart.
That's crazy.
A second?
It is.
Let's do...
Okay, it's 306.
It's just B-roll.
But this is a...
It's a factory that exists.
It can do one phone a second, so that's about 86,400 phones a day.
It operates in darkness, because it doesn't need any humans at it, so they don't need light.
And it pumps out a phone every second, and the Chinese company that designed it has some creepy, ominous, dystopian video future, and it would all be in Chinese.
I mean, just...
So how many seconds are there in a day?
68,000 seconds?
86,400.
86,000 seconds?
Yep.
Okay.
So how many phones does Apple currently produce a day?
They probably have to produce way more than that.
Let me think.
Let's search annual iPhone sales.
They sell units sold.
They sell 232 million phones in 23. How many?
232 million.
I'm sorry.
232 million.
Yes.
Worldwide.
Okay.
So wait.
Hold on.
That means that they have to produce.
A lot more than one a second.
They have to produce like a thousand a second.
Yeah, so one a second for a whole year would be about 30 million.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Yeah, of course.
You have to scale it out.
So they have to...
But is this for Apple or is this for some other company?
I believe it's just a different Chinese company.
China has some very strong smartphone makers.
Oh, that's my question.
So Jack, in China, what phone does Laobai Jing, the people of China, use?
What hardware do they use?
Probably either Xiaomi or Huawei.
So they don't use Apple.
They don't use Apple.
I mean, in addition to Apple.
Are Apple devices used by mainland Chinese?
Yeah, they are, but they're typically considered luxury items.
They're usually bought abroad as opposed to bought domestically.
Okay.
So...
I just dropped to the chat.
It's 500,000 a day iPhone at the Foxconn factory in China.
500,000 a day?
And then it's 350,000 employees.
That's crazy.
To make 500,000 a day.
And this is no employees, right?
Yeah, this was a Xiaomi factory.
Do you think this is all hype or do you think this is real?
I think it's real.
So this is where, this is kind of why we wanted to discuss it, is I think...
Because everyone tells me it's hype, but let's cope.
It's definitely cope.
So the thing is, is you often get the take of China, that China succeeds in manufacturing because they are, it's slave labor, you'll come in here, it's sweatshop labor, they just beat us on cost.
That is not accurate anymore.
And it's actually become less accurate super quickly.
Like the difference between the China of 2028...
You know, 17 years ago when they hosted the Olympics, 2008, 2008 Beijing Olympics to today, massive gap in what China is like.
Or even just five years ago.
Five years ago, China exported almost no cars.
Now they're the largest car exporter in the world.
And it's because they dominate in electric cars specifically.
China also is the, they install, in a given year, they install about half of all robots that are used in a factory setting.
And this pervades a ton of things.
So for like 5G, when you hear about 5G, what do you think about?
Russia.
Really?
I think about towers.
Or people think about cell phone radiation is going to give them brain cancer.
5G is actually not just about cell phones.
One of the biggest things about 5G is you can use it to interface a billion robots in your factory and have them all be super reliable and they're getting a super reliable signal and you can have your entire factory be so much more advanced and complicated and all of that.
When I say that, we talk about America re-industrializing, and I think a lot of people, they have this nostalgic vision of what manufacturing is, and they're like, oh, it was so cool when America had steel plants, and this guy could go in with a hard hat and work in his steel plant for 40 hours a week, and he would make this middle-class income and have a wife and his 2.7 kids.
And I'm not sure if people totally realize what manufacturing is at this point.
And what it would mean to bring it back to America.
Let me read something from a top, top businessman.
I'm not going to say who, but you guys would all know the name.
And I want you to say, because actually this was part of a group chat.
I'm on like 900 group chats.
And this video got popped up.
Someone put it in there.
And said, quote, America does not have enough people.
China has four times our population.
Continues by saying, China is extremely automated, so much more so than America.
Labor costs are not low in China.
What they have...
Exactly.
So do you agree with all that?
Do you think we don't have enough people?
I don't think it's number of people.
A lot of it is what those people learn.
It's taken decades to get to this point.
So it's that in China, it's prestigious to run a factory.
It's prestigious to be good at the stuff that goes into designing a factory.
You can make a good living.
You can make a good living, but it is truly prestigious.
Whereas, even if you wanted to...
Let's say you wanted to grow up and be a chemicals manufacturer in America.
Charlie, how do you become a chemicals manufacturer in America?
I don't really know.
What degree do you get?
Where do you go to school?
If you tell that to your neighbor, they're like, okay.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
There's no status.
Yeah, and what's the funnel to go into it?
It almost probably would be dumb luck.
Okay, you major in...
You either get a business degree or you major in a chemical engineering and you hopefully end up at the right company.
And even then, you're probably at that company.
What would you do if you wanted to go your own way and build your own facility from scratch?
Hugely difficult to imagine that.
But in China, they've been doing it for decades at this point.
So now what you have is, in China, you'll have millions of people with experience in running a factory.
So they know how a factory runs.
How do you build a factory?
They know how to build a factory.
And you have...
Regulators who are familiar with, okay, how do we approve building a factory?
How do we make sure it happens quickly?
What are the possible downsides?
It's all that expertise stuff that goes into it.
And the culmination is you can do that really automated stuff that's incredibly impressive.
And once you have the advantage there, it's a lot harder to lose it.
If your only advantage is having lower labor costs...
Then someone beats you by having even lower labor costs.
And that's happened.
They have other advantages.
Like garment.
You don't make shoes as much in China anymore.
You make those in Vietnam or Bangladesh.
You make them in places where there actually is lower labor.
And they've chosen to specialize in that.
But if their specialty is we have the absolute most advanced robots that can build a phone a second with no human input other than fixing a machine when it breaks.
How do you beat that, Charlie?
I don't know.
And this is...
The other problem is that if you try to bring back, which we should, industrial manufacturing, you're going to run into major labor unions.
I mean, they don't have labor unions in China.
Not like this.
I mean, they might have some form of...
You could correct me if I'm wrong, Blake, but I don't think they have, let's just say, the UAW.
Commies don't put up with unions, right?
That's part of the irony, though.
That's actually why they have so much automation.
There are Chinese factories where the quality of life in the factory is so bad.
That a worker would come in, like, they would have 100% turnover every six months.
And so the fix is mass automation.
What you have in America, we saw this with the longshoremen, is, like, we want to...
That's a sore topic around here.
Admittedly, admittedly, but that was the actual dispute they had, which is they opposed automation.
And the deal they reached was, don't automate.
This, like, wildly overweight soprano type comes in.
I'm going to shut down the ports if you give me what I want.
All right.
It's just not my favorite topic.
All right.
All right.
This is what our system is producing.
These girls are on Twitch or something.
Is that right?
Remember, the base of the Democrat Party is young, unmarried women who are very miserable and visit their doctors all the time for antidepressants and Xanax.
And young women tend to be very upset and very troubled.
Exhibit A, play cut 305.
Health insurance?
No.
Why?
Are you on your parents?
Yes.
Oh, congratulations.
What are you gonna do?
Okay, I get my own.
How?
With my money.
How?
What do you mean?
How?
Who do you call?
To get health insurance?
Yeah!
Someone who provides health insurance?
What is this question?
What do you mean?
Are you saying because you don't know how?
I don't know how!
Why don't you ask Ludd's parents?
Or your dad?
I come from a very Republican family.
You go to the doctor so often.
I can't believe you don't have health insurance.
This sounds like a lecture that I didn't expect.
You go so often.
I know, but I'm limited because I get really stressed because I don't have any resources and I get really confused.
It's the same reason that I went to culinary school instead of normal college.
No one prepped me.
My family abandoned me.
I didn't know.
All of a sudden, everyone in junior...
Junior year of high school is like, I got accepted into Harvard.
I got accepted into MIT.
And I'm like, wait, we were supposed to submit stuff?
I had no clue.
No one told me.
Everyone forgot about me.
I think my favorite part of that is you go to the doctor so much.
She's like 24. What did I just say?
I said they go to the doctor for all sorts of drugs because they're told they have all these problems.
All the time.
Right.
Meanwhile, we can't open factories.
We wonder why.
We can't even get on insurance policies.
There's an easy fix for this, by the way, folks.
It's also the same fix as the birth rate problem.
It's called traditional marriage.
Traditional marriage.
Could you imagine?
Someone being married to her?
Have you ever seen...
Can you imagine her running a factory?
Every time there's a crisis and it's this text exchange where it's this girl, I think a girlfriend messaging her boyfriend or maybe a wife, husband, and she just says, what's going on with the stock market today?
And he just replies, lol, don't worry about it, babe.
And she goes, okay, thank you.
Yay!
I love that.
That's kind of how it goes in our house.
She's like, so...
We're doing great.
Okay.
Alright, everyone.
Keep on committing thought crimes and our campus tour will continue.
Crowds are big.
Very big.
And Texas A&M was a great time, wasn't it, Blake?
Oh, it was amazing.
Can we play the Texas A&M War Hym video?
The one that we played on the show?
Blake, this was probably one of the most amazing Entrances of a cop.
And it was spur of the moment.
I think we only decided on it.
Ten minutes beforehand.
I was like, play the fight song.
Wore him.
Yeah, yeah.
That was so great.
I messaged one of my friends who goes to A&M.
Oh, you guys got really fired up for the fight song.
Wore him.
That was the reply I got.
By the way, they have all these traditions.
You can't wear your hats in the cafeteria.
They say gig him.
Cowdy.
They hiss him.
Cut him off.
Cut him off.
They say that.
I guess that's just a normal...
It may be the school with the most traditions of any school.
It's a lot.
Let's watch it.
Let's watch it.
I mean, that's the short version, but it was, it went two minutes.
It was two minutes long.
It was incredible.
Charlie, can you just, can you explain to me what a gig is when they say, because I understand it means something different down to the Aggies than it does to the rest of us.
I don't know, actually.
I don't know what they mean by gig them.
Gig him!
What do you mean gig?
In Philly, gig is like a show or a job.
Here's Mark Halpern.
Not Mark Halpern.
I've got the book on Mark Halpern's show.
This is Will Kane covering it.
But first, Texas doesn't play around.
This is fun.
All my New York producers just discovered the insanity, friendly insanity, Aggies, of Texas A&M.
So when Turning Point went to College Station, this just caught everybody in New York's eye.
I'm familiar.
This is our weird cousin in Texas, who we love, Aggies.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Marching, Marching, Marching.
you
Gig 'em is approval.
Universal sign of enthusiasm and approval.
It often is accompanied by a thumbs-up gesture and optimism, determination, and loyalty.
Oh, people loved this, by the way, when I did that, Tyler.
Oof, they loved it.
Yeah, oh, they loved it.
That was like...
That was the crescendo at the top.
Boom.
I got like 10 messages.
They're like, Charlie just did hordes down.
I'm like, what?
I saw the video.
We gotta do more SCC schools.
God bless everybody.
Thanks so much.
Gig 'em.
Howdy.
Hiss wore him.
I know all of the A&M folklore.
The funniest thing is, outside of politics, we strongly disagree with cut them off.
Or outside of college stuff.
Do not cut them off.
Do not cut them off.
Don't cut them off.
Unless it's a longhorn.
God bless.
Talk to you soon.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.
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