What actually IS Crimea? Why are America and Ukraine allied? Daisy joins the show to ask Blake questions about the history of Ukraine and the US/Russia conflict that you wanted answers to but were too afraid to ask. The team also fields voicemail questions from subscribers on the Senate's "blue slips," President Trump's anti-crime efforts, and more. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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I actually missed the first time that we did this, but I loved the idea of it.
I think we've done it twice.
Yeah, we did it twice.
Both times when I was.
Charlie had to get out of the chair super quickly one day, and I was like, Blake, explain everything that Charlie just said to me because I don't know what we're talking about.
So this is the no dumb questions.
And we've got some voicemails from the audience.
We're going to be looking at your emails.
So please email us freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
We're going to be hawking your emails this whole hour.
And then Daisy, you have just some of your own questions.
Yes, I quickly, well, at first, I just wanted to start with Blake, what actually is on the table in this Ukraine peace.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
We wanted to hit that.
We've talked about Ukraine a lot this week, but we wanted to hit, just actually lay out what everyone is talking about.
And I especially wanted to, because I think this peace deal you've heard about is one that Charlie would have liked a lot and he would have been a big fan of it.
So there's this 28-point plan.
This is what came out a week ago.
And then there's been efforts to modify it where Europeans have proposed counterplans.
But I think the nicest thing is the 28-point plan because it seems this was worked on by the administration directly.
And so point one, it says, Ukraine's sovereignty will be confirmed.
Okay, that's a formal one.
Sovereignty confirmed.
That is a fancy way of saying Ukraine will remain a country.
It will remain independent.
It will not be annexed.
It will not be absorbed by Russia or anybody else.
It'll remain a country.
And it then says, this is, and point two is actually one of the most important.
It is there will be a comprehensive non-aggression agreement between Russia, Ukraine, and Europe.
And then this is key.
All ambiguities of the last 30 years will be considered settled.
This is why I was a fan when I read this plan, that the intent of this is to be a final peace treaty with no outstanding business.
And when we've seen Europe try to mess with this, a big way they've tried to mess with it is by introducing ambiguities back into it.
So an important part of this plan, one of its components is it would cede land to Russia, more or less.
Let's put up that image we have.
122.
Yes.
And so 122, is it up yet?
Yes, there it is.
And so what it would do is those areas in red are roughly match places that are currently held by Russia that America, the international community have considered part of Ukraine.
And these are the places they've captured.
Crimea in the south, which is now covered by our Chiron, but Crimea was taken about a decade ago.
These others were taken during the invasion.
This would formally cede them to Russia.
It would now be owned by Russia.
We would acknowledge Russian territory.
That's the key.
That is the key part.
They were previously and have always been a part of Ukraine.
Not always.
Well, so, yeah, so they were part of Ukraine at its independence.
Ukraine became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991.
And so when they became independent, they took all those lands.
Russia has had claim on some of them, well, has generated claims on some of them.
There's been a long source of conflict.
They invaded over the status of many of these territories, and that is roughly the area that they have conquered by force of arms.
And this deal would recognize those captured territories as Russian.
That's part of the removing ambiguities thing.
So was Russia's initial intent to take over all of Ukraine or to take these.
People would debate it.
Russia's stated intention for invading Ukraine was to denazify it.
They claimed Ukraine was run by Nazis.
That is highly debatable as an assertion at minimum.
But it does seem their initial plan, they did, they attacked directly towards Kiev, the nation's capital.
They literally had paratroopers land at the airport of the city.
They seemed to believe that Ukraine was a very weak country and would just collapse almost instantly once attacked.
And in fact, if you follow the news story, then a lot of Americans expected the same thing.
The Biden administration seems to have offered, oh, Zelensky, you can flee the country and just come to America.
And Zelensky, I will say to his credit, did not do that.
I know Charlie Mani has had a lot of criticism of Zelensky on justified grounds, but he did not.
And they fought a lot harder than they expected.
So I think one reason Charlie would support this deal is he would probably believe Russia would be inclined to respect a final peace settlement because this war has been a lot longer, a lot bloodier, a lot more expensive, a lot rougher on everyone than was expected.
A lot of wars are like that.
So is this a win for either party or is this a pretty mutual compromise?
I'll try to take the Charlie thing and say the biggest winners of all would be the Ukrainian people who are not conscripted and fed into a meat grinder so that Washington can feel good about themselves and how they're fighting Russia and being tough on Russia.
You know, we don't need to kill a bunch of Ukrainian 18-year-olds so Lindsey Graham can feel tough.
Having said that, the peace deal would be seen, I would say, as a victory more towards Russia because it is better for Russia than the deal that was on the table before the war began, that Russia was offering to us.
What were they offering?
Russia's deal that they were proposing in early 22 was essentially: if you agree that Crimea is part of Russia, because they'd already occupied that, if you agree not to admit Ukraine into NATO and not position certain military forces close to Russia, they were proposing a peace deal along those lines.
So it would have had them have less land and it just would have involved fewer concessions than this agreement would have.
Why does Russia not want Ukraine and NATO?
So the most helpful way to think of it is Ukraine, from the Russian perspective, is like the has long been a part of their country.
That Russian culture began in Kiev and it was part of the Russian Empire for hundreds of years.
You're reminding me of Tucker's interview with Putin.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Tucker asked Putin about Ukraine and he gives this literal half-hour answer about the history of Ukraine.
But the core of it is, from the Russian perspective, they see Ukraine as this core part of Russia.
And so it would be, imagine if America had a really devastating thing and New England broke away and became its own country.
And obviously, we have a lot of political differences from New England.
So, you could see how they'd possibly be happy to be independent from us.
Or text us.
But I wanted to go with New England, where America began.
Sure, yeah.
And then imagine China came along and was suddenly cultivating New England as an ally and talking about adding them to the Chinese Belt and Roadblock.
And, you know, maybe we should put some military forces in New England.
We can maybe put a nuclear missile there.
And I think even though we would see a lot of political differences with New England, oh, it's full of all these insane libs and commies, we would still be really upset by that.
That's the best way to do it.
It's sort of like the Cuban missile crisis.
I mean, which is more extreme than that.
Because you've never owned Cuba.
No, but Cuba being so close to us, we had this Cuban missile crisis in the 1960s because Russia was positioning arms right on the in Cuba, which is what?
Like, what's the 90 miles to 40 miles before?
And that was a huge, huge geopolitical issue of the time.
This is when kids were in schools were learning to get under their desks and having to do these nuclear fallout drills.
So, you know, the boomer generation remembers this.
And so it's sort of akin to that, where, you know, you could imagine having a hostile military force, NATO, which is considered one of the most robust, well-funded military alliances in the world.
It's probably the most robust.
Having that at your doorstep is not a very promising or delightful idea for the Russians.
So when they say that they are basically they're covering all, I think you said, conflicts over the last 30 years, putting those to rest, that means then that Russia, they would be at peace with the parts of Ukraine that they have gotten back.
Yes.
And they would be saying we will not demand anything more, and we in return would end the sanctions.
We reintegrate Russia into the global economy.
The objective of the peace deal would be a true peace deal, not just a ceasefire, not just we stop shooting, that this is considered the resolution of the conflict.
And I know Charlie very badly wanted that.
He thought it was dumb that we were in this new Cold War with Russia going on forever when we have conflicts with China, for example.
I think he viewed this as a distraction and a product of Washington being unable to move on.
An absolute waste, by the way, of American taxpayer dollars and munitions.
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All right.
More dumb, no dumb questions.
No, they're not dumb.
There's no such thing as a dumb question this hour.
You get to ask exactly what you're doing.
But you get to watch me learn them live on air.
Yes, this is the appeal.
The reason that Blake and I have to do no prep for these segments at all is because these are genuine questions that I have.
You have to ask them.
And I'm willing.
I bet.
I'm willing to be the dumb person.
I bet many people in the audience have the same questions.
So keep going, Daisy.
So, what we just talked about, America paying for a lot of this war.
I know that we've obviously been doing that for a long time.
That's been a huge topic of conversation, especially on this show.
My question is: why are we the ones that presented this peace deal?
Like, are we just the first ones to come up with these ideas that, hey, you guys could have this?
So, the war is between Russia and Ukraine, but certainly from Russia's perspective, their argument is that Ukraine is just a puppet state of America.
And also, America is, it is America that keeps the war, that makes it so Ukraine can fight the war.
We've given them hundreds of billions of dollars in munitions, in economic aid.
We give them a lot of intelligence.
We are the ones who are enabling the war to keep going.
And Trump has sort of waffled back and forth whether he wants to cut off aid to Ukraine or deciding actually Russia's the problem.
He's sort of clearly had his attitude on the conflict evolve just over the past year.
And his goal, he's the one who also is probably the most avid believer that this should end in a peaceful resolution.
When you're in a war, you get more radicalized, you get more intense about it.
And I think that's probably the perspective of both a lot of the Russians and the Ukrainians.
The Russians think we've lost a million casualties, according to some reports, trying to take this.
We should demand the whole country.
And you have Ukrainians who are like, we can never yield anything.
And America is the player who can exert the most pressure overall to try to bring this to a peaceful conclusion.
Yes.
Okay, that makes sense because we, which I do have another longer question about this once we come back from break about America and Ukraine being allies, but it makes sense that we have been aid to Ukraine and then Russia, which was a big part of Trump's election.
Russia respects Trump's leadership.
So they've said.
So are we the only country that could have presented this?
I think so.
We're the only country that seems serious about it.
A very frustrating thing that's happened over and over is Europe, which is not contributing as much as America, has gotten much more interested in keeping the war going forever.
And what Charlie would complain about is they want the war to go forever.
They want people to keep dying, but they have no serious plan to make the situation better for Ukraine.
This is from Sherry.
It says, Hi, guys.
Why is no one reporting or talking about Ukrainian corruption?
Currently, many scandals, stolen money, blowing up pipelines, killing Christians, biolabs, and human sex trafficking.
Why no investigations into who all is getting kickbacks?
Well, you know, what's funny, this is actually that popped up as part of the peace deal because I believe the original proposed peace plan has an aspect to say, oh, and as part of the peace deal, we'll do an audit for financial stuff because that's important to Trump to make sure the money was used well.
And the revised peace plan that was promoted by the Europeans tweaks this to there shall be a full amnesty for all actions during the war, which I think a lot of people who have seen how much corruption there is, there are people in Ukraine who, while their country's been fighting, have become centimillionaires off of aid money.
It's always been a very corrupt country.
It's one of the worst things about it.
Well, and I know that there's been a little kerfuffle and a fallout with MTG, but I will say MTG was very good on this particular issue.
She was demanding full accountability and a full accounting of where all of America's dollars have gone.
And I support that idea still.
Daisy, you have a long one that you would like to ask.
Well, I think it's going to be a longer explanation, but we were talking about why the U.S. is the only country that's positioned to present this peace deal to Ukraine and Russia.
My question, and I don't think this is a dumb question specifically.
I think that a lot of people my age would have this question because growing up, you hear a lot about who our allies are.
There are so many conflicts that we've gotten in that haven't made sense, but it's like, okay, we do have a long-standing agreement or relationship with this country that it makes sense that we're in these conversations.
I was not aware, and I don't really know why we are allies with Ukraine until this all started happening in 2021.
So, the question is: why are we allies with Ukraine?
Yeah, and when did that start?
To some extent, that is a good question.
So, we had this and we thought we had to have this on air.
Are you familiar with what the Cold War is, Daisy?
Okay.
So, Blake asked me this.
And yeah, to some extent, I believe it is about communism, and I do not think that it was actual boots on the ground conflict.
And I also do believe that it was at some point in maybe the 90s, maybe the 80s.
That's 80s.
All righty, there we go.
I love Gen Z so much.
So, the Cold War was Russia used to be the Soviet Union, the USSR.
Much bigger country.
Ukraine was part of it.
Belarus was part of it.
All those stands you can see in Central Asia, they were all part of it.
It was a much bigger country.
And it was communist.
It wanted to spread communism.
It was an ideological state seen as a huge threat in America and the West, as it should be.
They were promoting atheism.
They opposed free enterprise.
They opposed election.
They just very bad country.
And we stood against them.
We had our allies in NATO, in Western Europe, opposed to the USSR.
Fortunately, communism doesn't work.
So their economy went down into the toilet.
They began to have ethnic fractiousness because it was a multi-ethnic empire.
And because diversity is not always a strength, everyone.
And so in 1991, the Soviet Union collapses.
It breaks into a bunch of pieces.
1991, Russia's, did I say 1999?
Yeah, 1991.
They fracture apart, and Ukraine is one of the breakaway parts.
Other countries break off.
Russia's the biggest piece left.
And what I would say is, there we go.
The reason, frankly, we're allies with Ukraine is even after this happened, we essentially remained hostile with Russia.
Why that happened?
We'd need a whole hour to get into the details of why that happened.
I can detail here because we've talked about NATO.
NATO was a reaction to the USSR and the encroachment of Soviet Russia or communist USSR.
And so one could ask a larger question of why they're not going to be able to do that.
Why did NATO exist?
Why did NATO still exist?
And instead, what we did is we, after the war, almost from a fit of just like idealism or because it was sentimentalism, like, oh, these new countries are democracies.
It'd be cool if they could join our cool democracy club.
We expand NATO.
So we add Poland, Hungary, Estonia.
We add all these countries in Eastern Europe that used to be communist and allied with the Soviets.
And if you're Russia, the only possible justification for this is, oh, you're expanding your anti-Russia military alliance to be closer to Russia.
And so that hurt relations a lot.
And I think there's also just a lot of lingering anti-Russia paranoia.
If you're a 65-year-old veteran of the military, the first entire half of your career was, oh, we're still hostile towards Russia.
You grew up with the Cold War.
And so we've cultivated, because of this, we've cultivated Ukraine as this anti-Russian country.
And Ukraine has differences with Russia on a whole bunch of things.
There's reasons they're in conflict with each other.
And that's, we basically, why are we allies with Ukraine?
We're allies with Ukraine because we are not friendly with Russia is the biggest reason.
You have to also understand that one of the key motivators for Vladimir Putin, who came of age when the USSR fell, is that he sees that as a really giant mistake, that it was allowed to fall.
So all of those countries right there that were allowed to basically become independent and secede from Russia or the USSR.
And so he is, a lot of people suspect, one of his key drivers is that he wants to reunite the lost pieces of the USSR.
And he sees Ukraine as the apple of Russia's eye.
Okay, so then that leads into my next question.
What makes Ukraine different than any of these other countries that I'm looking at on this map?
Like, are they going for Ukraine and then they're going for the other ones next?
That's what people who don't like Russia would say.
What I think Charlie would argue, and I would agree, is Russia has made it clear they view Ukraine as different.
It was part of Russia longer.
A lot of the people there are ethnically Russian.
A lot of people there speak Russian.
It was that historical heartland of Russia.
Russia's repeatedly said, we think Ukraine is way more important.
So, for example, Finland borders Russia.
They joined NATO over this invasion, and Russia said, we're okay with that.
It's not the end of the world for us.
But they have said, we will not allow Ukraine to join NATO.
And part of this 28-point peace plan says Ukraine can't join NATO.
NATO can't have troops in Ukraine.
And in fact, it still says you can treat it as a violation of NATO's self-defense if we invade Ukraine again, but you just can't have them join.
Well, I think that's something Charlie would say.
I think that makes it really key is Crimea, which we can explain in just a second.
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All right, Daisy, you have a good question.
I do feel like I am in a way like the sacrificial lamb asking these.
This is great.
Don't do it, please.
This is a good question.
I don't even know what Crimea is.
I'm looking for it on the map.
I don't know if it is a country or if it is a city.
So Crimea is the peninsula at the south end of Ukraine on the map.
It kind of looks like it might be an island, but there's a tiny little land bridge connecting them.
Right here.
This little thing right here.
Yep.
So is it a country or a city?
So it is a territory.
And what it was is, historically, it wasn't even part of Russia.
They got it somewhat later than other parts of Russia.
It was owned by Muslims.
There was the Crimean Tatars.
There were these warlords who would ride out and they would attack Christians and take them away as slaves.
We should also ask what Khrushchev's.
And so we'll get into that.
We'll get into that.
And so Russia fights wars against the Muslims.
finally conquer it and what's very important about this is it's legally was part of ukraine even like when so it wasn't even first of all it was originally part of russia It was just a part of Russia.
And it was settled by Russians because originally it was just a Muslim territory.
So you just have to bring in new people to settle it.
So they settle Russians there.
They build military bases.
And it's part of, this is in the 1700s into the 1800s.
During the Soviet Union period, so this is in maybe around 1960.
Just because he is sentimental about it, Nikita Khrushchev is the leader of the Soviet Union.
Nikita Khrushchev says, it's been 300 years since Ukraine and Russia have been one country.
So to honor this, I'm going to just transfer Crimea from being administratively part of Russia to being administratively part of Ukraine.
And to him, he considers it totally irrelevant because they're both just part of the same country.
There's no real difference between them.
It's just, yeah, we're a big, we're a big happy family.
It's like giving a gift to one of your kids or something.
Yeah.
When did this person do this?
He did it around 1960.
I don't know the exact year, but that's around when he did it.
And it would have never mattered, except then the Soviet Union breaks up and they break up exactly along their internal lines within the USSR.
So Crimea is a region of Ukraine, but it has no ethnic Ukrainians.
No one speaks Ukrainian there.
They speak Russian.
It has a major Russian military base.
And if you're Russia, your attitude is this Russian place is part of Ukraine for no reason other than Nikita Khrushchev being this dumb guy who wanted to make a sentimental gesture.
And so they were really upset about that.
So when there was previous political turmoil in Ukraine where a pro-Russian government got overthrown, a pro-U.S. government came in instead, Russia freaks out and says, all right, we're just taking this.
And they send in troops into Crimea.
This was during the Obama years.
During the Obama years.
And Ukraine is weak at this time.
They can't fight back.
Russia takes it basically without a shot.
And one thing that's important is almost everyone agrees the vast majority of Crimeans are completely fine with this.
They are Russia.
They're being a part of Russia.
Yeah, they actually wanted to be part of Russia.
So there's very little resistance to this.
Anyone who is opposed to it leaves pretty quickly.
And one of the things that has stopped peace is Russia has said we are categorically never giving Crimea back to Ukraine.
You have to understand.
So the Black Sea Fleet base in Sevastopol is Russia's only warmwater naval base in the Black Sea.
So that means that from a military standpoint, Crimea is strategically like, I can't stress how important it is to them.
So this part is what their naval base is based on.
Exactly.
So they were saying, like, if you try to attack Crimea with land troops, we will use nuclear weapons the way we would if you attacked Moscow or St. Petersburg.
This is what they project power into the entire Mediterranean, the Middle East, Africa.
That is their launching.
So there is no peace deal on the table if Russia does not get Crimea.
Russia, I believe Russia would categorically never accept it.
They will never, never.
And we have no way to take it back for that matter.
By the way, can you throw up that map again?
I think it was, I forget what the number is.
It was 122.
If you could take the lower banner off as well for this, you can see.
So all those areas.
Take the banner away.
There we go.
All those areas in red are basically Russian-speaking, ethnically Russian.
And what's interesting, too, is if you go back to throw up 270, I'll never forget this.
This was right at the beginning of this conflict.
Elon Musk put up this tweet saying, redo the elections of the annexed region.
So what he was going to say is, like, hey, let's skip the million casualties.
Let's just do an election run by the UN in those regions.
And Ukraine told him to go pound sand.
It lost even on its poll, right?
And then he said, Crimea formerly part of Russia as it's been since 1783 until Khrushchev's mistake.
So literally, we could have, we're basically going to end in the same place, but instead of UN supervision of these elections, we're just giving them to Russia now, is essentially what we're going to do.
But we just have a million casualties and billions of dollars wasted.
This was always where this was going to end.
I got an email from Tara.
I watch on RAV every day, and this is the best show ever.
This 55-year-old really needs this history lesson.
Thank you from Tara.
Tara, thank you so much for making me feel less like a moron.
Yeah, you got 55-year-olds and Gen Zers uniting for this 300-year-old Russian history lesson.
So do we want to keep.
Do you have more questions?
We just covered crime.
We did promise a lot of, we promised other topics.
We can keep going on this if you guys want, but we do have, do we want to do any of the voicemails, Daisy?
Yeah, we totally can.
I think we should probably, let's, we can start with 224.
This is from Steve.
I went through a lot of them.
They were pretty good, but these were the ones that I also had questions about.
All right.
Good morning.
Let me say that I love Charlie Kirk.
I miss Charlie Kirk.
And my best to Erica and all of the team there at Turning Point USA and Turning Point Action.
My question is this, and the cities of Seattle, Washington, Memphis, and all cities where Trump is sending the National Guard, what happens when the National Guard leaves and we have a corrupt city council, mayor, police chief, etc.
Thank you, and God bless you for all you do.
Well, that's the crux of it.
What I think I would point out is even in D.C., a lot of what the National Guard has done has primarily been, I think you'd agree, symbolic.
It's having, you have the image of people maintaining order in big, prominent public places.
This does free up manpower.
It frees up police to send more guys to dangerous places to make arrests for other things.
But so much of it is also just the bigger, it's the miasma.
It's the vibe that's going on.
Think about what 2020 was.
Murder rates go up 30% overnight, not just in places where there's riots.
They go up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
We had 19 murders that year, a huge increase from others.
It was like the country had this psychotic break where it was more okay with committing crimes.
People were more violent and police were less willing to stop them.
And what Trump's doing with the National Guard deployments, it's less that the guard are literally arresting people and literally stopping crimes.
And much more, it's a bid to say crime is unacceptable in America, especially in our best cities, in our capital.
And we are going to treat it as a problem that must be resolved.
And if not, there will be consequences.
And you're trying to shift, Charlie loved that word, the Overton window towards crime is a serious thing, you must stop.
And away from what we routinely see, where city officials just don't view crime as a problem.
They want to dismiss charges, throw out charges.
We had that case, I believe it was in Chicago, where this guy set a woman on fire and he had, what, 50 prior arrests, 100 prior arrests?
72.
72 prior arrests.
72.
And by the way, we've seen instance after instance of this.
And this was, and it's almost like the, what's the, what would be a word for it?
It's like, it's like the zeitgeist, the spirit of the time or something, where you got from the 90s.
The 90s was an era where we started policing cities.
We flooded urban cores with a lot more police officers.
And you saw crime precipitously drop in LA, New York, and big cities all across the country.
So the spirit of the age then was tough on crime.
That's when we got the three strikes rule in California.
And then cities started gentrifying because they were safe to invest in.
So business money floods in.
Property values skyrocket.
And we sort of forget the lessons of the 90s.
And slowly but surely, we stop.
We forget the fact that we once lived in a high crime urban core and we lived with these problems.
So then guess what?
That's what started happening in 2014 with the Ferguson.
We had the Ferguson effect.
That was kind of the first iteration of the Black Lives Matter movement.
And then boom, 2020, we had the George Floyd riots.
And it's like all of the lessons of the 90s went out the window.
And here's what else happened.
We have had this slow infiltration.
And you would agree with this, I believe, Blake, within especially the legal system where we started basically treating crime as, well, what race are you?
What's your background?
Have you been systemically oppressed by the system?
And this would spill over in Canada.
You just straight up had actually, I think in Washington state, a court said, oh, you actually just have to consider what race someone is in terms of how much you punish them for committing crime.
Because there was a lot of hocus pocus going on with the data, right?
Because they would essentially say, well, look at too many black people are incarcerated versus their white counterparts or their Hispanic counterparts.
Well, and the truth, sadly, is, and I actually was tweeting about this.
Elon gave me a quote tweet this morning because I said, We don't have enough people in prison and we don't have enough capacity either.
That's a thought crime for you.
We don't have enough prison capacity.
But, anyways, there's this hocus-pocus, this kind of woo-woo going on with the numbers saying, Well, then black people must be over-policed.
Well, the truth is, is that unfortunately, a lot of black people tend to congregate in the urban core, and there's more crime in the black community.
This is something Charlie was unafraid to address head-on and directly, and he took a lot of flack for it, but it's just the case.
And so, we stopped policing, we stopped punishing, and we started letting people off.
And guess what happens when you do that?
You get a spike in crime, and we've had that spike in crime since George Floyd.
Now, a lot of people will then say, Well, look at DC, Blake, crime was down 35%.
We don't need the National Guard.
Well, it turns out that they were cooking the books.
There was a big investigation that was ongoing within the MPD, within the DC police department, where supervisors were going around telling police officers to downgrade serious felonies, violent felonies, so they didn't show up on the FBI crime statistics.
So, my belief is that this is a national epidemic, that they're doing this in cities all across the country.
They're downgrading serious felonies so that the crime rate looks artificially low.
And you get this vibe from places like Chicago and Memphis and D.C., where they will tell you crime may be going down statistically, but I don't feel safer.
I don't feel the crime rate going down.
Yeah, and so much of this is the word you'd use is disorder, which is it's not just the literal violent crime, it's these casual seeding of the public space to anti-social elements.
So, that's what you know, tent cities of homeless guys just kind of moping about, or even this is actually a very mild one.
But for example, in on subways and in public buses, you're not supposed to play loud music, just you know, blast your phone on speakerphone.
And what is a 100% known phenomenon is that there will be young men who just go and, as a performatively hostile act, they'll blast their music really loud.
Sound pollution, yeah, sound pollution.
And you, everyone just has to put up with it because, okay, if it's like if it's a young, if it's a young black man, a 55-year-old guy is not going to go up, or a young woman is not going to go up and say, turn your music off, that's inappropriate.
Because we'll be frank, they'll be worried they'll get killed or assaulted or something really horrible.
Or someone will record them on their cell phone and blast this Karen on TikTok.
And the way you have to stop that is you actually have to have authorities, the authorities punish this.
Or think of something that's non-violent: turnstile jumping.
How demoralizing is it for you to be this, you know, this sucker who has to pull out, who's pulling out your card to pay $3 to ride on the subway train, and then you see teenagers jump over it, get on, no one stops them.
You have to stop these low-level things.
That is so important to the public's morale since they live in a successful society.
I think so.
So much of the public debate nowadays is between chaos and order.
You said disorder.
It's chaos, which is the Democrats seem to love it.
They seem to sow chaos into the system by their policies, by their pandering to criminals and illegal immigrants.
They always seem to pick the side of the illegal immigrant, the criminal, the systemically oppressed, over-law-abiding American citizens.
And I think that's what we saw in 2024: finally the country said enough.
And so they want more aggressive policing.
They want more muscular policing.
And you just have to, to your point, kind of full circle moment, you have to assert a new Overton window.
You have to assert a new zeitgeist that says, we are going to be a law and order country.
We don't have to live like this.
You can just do things, right?
So, but by the way, the caller's question was, Blake, what happens when you get corrupt new leadership in town?
Well, unfortunately, you're probably going to revert back to the chaos and the disorder of corruption, right?
And so that's why local elections matter.
That's why we have to keep our pedal to the metal and keep insisting on law and order, keep insisting that we lock up career criminals.
You know, Blake, I actually believe.
Let's get into it.
Hold on.
I just actually believe that if you incarcerated, let's say there's probably 500,000 people in this country that deserve to be imprisoned that are not.
Let's just say maybe that's a low number.
But if you got rid of the career criminals, you would see crime dry up really quick.
All right, let's see.
We have got more of these.
Do you want to do the Iowa one?
Yeah, let's see.
Okay, I have no idea what this is going to be.
Let's do 269 from Scott.
As a voter in Iowa, home to the Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman, I want to ask your view on how that committee's delay and rigid adherence to the outdated blue slip process contributed to this week's outcomes regarding James Comey and Letitia James.
So, my question before we get to his question is: I don't know.
I don't even know what he asked because I don't know the blue slip committee.
It's a good question.
An aspect of so the president appoints judges.
They're called Article III judges.
So it's not just the Supreme Court.
Trump can appoint people to the Court of Appeals and to the District Court.
And a lot of district courts are they match basically state boundaries.
So, for example, there's the Southern District of New York.
That is a federal court.
It covers southern New York, where New York City is.
Or I think there's a district for South Dakota.
There's a district for different parts of California.
There's a bunch of these.
And by tradition, when you've nominated judges to serve on these district courts in a specific state, it's been with some approval of the senators from that state.
And so, what that has meant, for example, is you get more conservative judges, even under Democrat administrations, in red states, and you get more liberal judges in blue states because they're going to have these blue senators who will not allow you to just appoint whoever you want.
And this has, I guess, you could say the upside of this would be you get you have judges who are a little more in line with their states, but the downside is obvious.
A lot of our most important jurisdictions, New York City, the Bay Area, Los Angeles, they're in these blue states that are just going to have blue judges.
And you get more liberal rulings as a result when, okay, we've had these Republicans in office for so long with the Senate.
Why don't we have more conservative courts that are delivering conservative rulings on things?
How much is this playing a role in things?
It definitely is playing a role.
I don't think it played a super specific role in the Comey ruling.
So here's the deal: this is Judge Cameron McGowan Curry.
So she was actually from, she was appointed by President Bill Clinton, who's a Democrat, in March 1994.
But she originally was to the U.S. District Court of South Carolina.
At the time, a blue slip policy wasn't in effect.
And guess who was chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time?
Was it already Grassley?
He's been around.
No, it was Joe Biden.
Oh, whoa!
Yeah.
Joseph Robinette Biden.
Get this.
South Carolina's two senators in 94 were Strom Thurman, a Republican, and Ernst Hollings, a Democrat.
And both the Republican and the Democrat gave a positive blue slip on that particular norm.
An important thing, the blue slip is a thing, and we probably should move on from it and get actual conservatives in court.
But there's so many other things, and one of those is just we have to be really good about who we're putting in courts because conservatives have for a long time lagged on treating these as hugely important ideological actions to get really conservative people with good values into court positions.
All right, let's throw up that image 273 when you guys have it.
This is Judge McGowan, Cameron McGowan.
So she has been around since the 90s being a federal judge.
And so, listen, you would probably say, Blake, that you were a little skeptical of Lindsey Halligan's appointment, right?
So you're not necessarily surprised.
They're going to appeal this.
They're going to have a second bite of the apple here.
Well, it's challenging because the Trump administration has, they've been assertive.
They've pushed a lot.
They put pressure on a lot of norms because they'll look at, for example, the blue slip thing and say, wait, why do we do this?
We just intentionally make ourselves weaker.
We have a majority in the Senate.
We could appoint someone else, and we're just not.
That's also clearly what's driving President Trump on the filibuster.
I think he says he's the kind of guy who will say, oh, we have this thing where we can't pass legislation because we need 60 votes, but we can get rid of it.
Why are we not getting rid of it?
That's how Trump approaches a lot of these things.
And so similarly with this Halligan thing is this is where you have a real tension in the system because the president can appoint U.S. attorneys.
He can fire U.S. attorneys, but they're supposed to be Senate confirmed.
And there's a law that says a judge can appoint an interim one, but the president can fire them too.
That's actually just a real crisis.
What do you do if a judge can appoint someone and the president can fire them instantly?
That's an impasse.
That's bad law design, in my opinion.
Well, but you're also hitting at something that's really key to understanding the Trump era is this idea of norms, customs, traditions.
Some of them feel arbitrary in our current moment.
It's why Charlie loved to talk about the importance of the John Adams thing.
We need a moral and religious people.
We have laws, but the laws have to be buttressed by good disposition, good norms, good moral behavior.
That's right.
This is interesting.
Priscilla says, not chaos versus order, chaos versus control.
Flashback to the get smart TV series of the 1960s.
I didn't watch that one.
This one says, Robert says Blake is ignorant of the pre-2022 history of Ukraine.
Maybe we should dive into that email and see if there's any.
He says I'm spouting neocon BS.
Oh, no offense, Robert.
I take that a little personally.
What I'm trying to do is I am trying to be fair-minded.
So I've repeatedly referenced what Russia's perspective on it would be, what those opposed to Russia's perspective on it would be, because that is what is dictating things.
I assure you, I'm not a neo- Are you unaware that the state of Ukraine and its borders were arbitrarily made by Lenin and Stalin in 1922 as one of the USSR's Soviet republics?
That's true.
All right.
Oh, this is great.
Kevin says, Andrew, I've heard Memphis officers call into Memphis morning news that confirm what you were saying.
Crimes are being downgraded here in the mid-South area to keep the statistics down.
Y'all continue to do the work that needs to be done in Christ, Kevin.
Thank you.
I told you it was a national phenomenon because you had the spike after George Floyd, and all these blue cities wanted to be like, it's not, we're not crime-ridden here.
Don't worry.
Nothing to see here.
It makes perfect sense.
Okay, we have another voicemail.
We are in the no dumb questions hour.
268 is the next voicemail.
Yeah, let's just listen to it and then I have something to say.
Hello, this is Ben from Central Florida.
Wondering what the administration is going to do about what's going on in Ethiopia, Somalia, Nigeria, with all the Christians being persecuted and being killed.
Would love to know what Trump plans on doing and helping.
Okay, so one, I think this is a really good question.
But two, I want everyone to know the reason I know about this situation is from Nikki Minaj, who has been talking about it everywhere.
She's doing press conferences, she's tweeting.
I know Riley and I have been talking about it a lot.
Nikki Minaj is really, really in on this Ethiopian crisis for Christians.
Which is interesting because she's not from she's Trinidadian, I believe, right?
From Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean.
I haven't let me find out, though.
Yeah, I believe so.
I don't know if she now I'm looking at.
Can I just while you're looking this up?
So on October 31st, Trump designated Nigeria as a country of particular concern.
On November 1st, he threatened to halt all U.S. foreign aid and deploy military guns ablazing if killings continue.
November 2nd, ordered the Pentagon, referred to as Department of War, to prepare for possible action, including troops or airstrikes.
And then November 21st labeled the violence a genocide against Christians during a Fox News interview.
So he's been ratcheting up his language.
And of course, this is about Boko Haram, which is a radical Islamist group that is targeting.
If you want, we talked about Ukraine being a somewhat unnatural country with Russian portions.
Nigeria is an insanely unnatural country of Africa.
It literally is on a scale.
If you start at the south of Nigeria, you have Christian areas, mixed, mix, mixed.
You get up into the north, and it's not just Muslim, it's radical Muslim.
They're trying to Boko Haram roughly translates as Western knowledge forbidden or like education forbidden.
They'll do things, they do insane atrocities.
They'll kidnap Christian girls and turn them into sex slaves for their soldiers.
Nigeria should very obviously.
I'm probably going to start a diplomatic incident by just saying this.
Nigeria should not be one country.
Nigeria should probably be several countries.
Maybe the Nigerians will get angry about this, but it's, you have, I mean, some estimates place it at almost 125,000 Christians have died between 2023 and 20, I'd be on the high level.
It's.
It's a nation almost evenly split between Christians and Muslims, but I believe the Muslims are growing faster.
So that's a very dire situation to be in if you're a Christian in the South.
And then it's the same thing.
Why is Ethiopia the same issue?
Ethiopia is historically one of the oldest Christian countries in the world.
It's been Christian since I believe the 300s or the 400s.
I have a story here.
And they, but the country is, it's large.
It has a lot of Islamic areas.
So it has a lot of civil strife and Christians get caught in the crossfire.
And certainly we're seeing that our administration has at least adopted it as something worthy of interest for us to care about the fate of Christians around the world.
Philip in the Bible went to Ethiopia.
Yes, and he baptized the Ethiopian eunuch as well.
So one thing I will say that was very telling.
So I actually got an Uber ride.
The guy was Ethiopian, and we were talking about Islam in Ethiopia.
And he said when he was growing up, there was a very small minority of Muslims in Ethiopia.
And he remembers playing with them as a kid.
They sort of minded their own business.
They were a small, small minority.
But now, he said it's probably about like 30% in his area of Ethiopia.
And he said, now they're taking over.
They're taking over the streets.
They're taking over public places.
They're worshiping aloud.
They've got the Muslim call to prayer.
And he was like, I warn you in America, don't let this happen.
They will take over.
And this is places they can get a lot more aggressive about it.
These are weak states.
You don't have a police force that can come and enforce order.
You can have an aggressive, assertive Islam take over a city, kill a lot of people.
And what I will say is Charlie would oppose more U.S. boots on the ground in more countries.
He didn't want foreign wars, but he would like that for once America does treat the survival of Christians as a priority abroad.
We invaded Iraq.
We did all these interventions.
And almost always Christians died in the crossfire.
So it's nice for us to acknowledge that that's bad.
By the way, Rich says that we forgot that the Ukraine was the breadbasket of the former USSR.
