THOUGHTCRIME Ep. 117- America First vs America Only? Luigi the Musical? Kids in Church?
Turning Point USA's promotion of early marriage and activism frames the "America First" doctrine as a path to global primacy rather than isolationism, while prediction markets like Polymarket raise alarms over insider trading influencing military strikes in Iran. The hosts condemn "Luigi the Musical" for glorifying an unrepentant assassin and debate whether welcoming disruptive children in church validates Matt Walsh's stricter views on worship decorum. Ultimately, the episode critiques the normalization of violence and the erosion of institutional norms through populist rhetoric and performative politics. [Automatically generated summary]
I run the largest pro-American student organization in the country fighting for the future of our republic.
My call is to fight evil and to proclaim truth.
If the most important thing for you is just feeling good, you're going to end up miserable.
But if the most important thing is doing good, you'll end up purposeful.
College is a scam, everybody.
You got to stop sending your kids to college.
You should get married as young as possible and have as many kids as possible.
Go start a Turning Point USA college chapter.
Go start a Turning Point USA high school chapter.
Go find out how your church can get involved.
Sign up and become an activist.
I gave my life to the Lord in fifth grade.
Most important decision I ever made in my life.
And I encourage you to do the same.
Here I am.
Lord, use me.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, we are back with another edition, live edition of Thursday Thought Crime.
Definitely been a little bit since we've been here on live.
Excited to be back doing this.
We've had some elections going on.
We've got a war going on.
But the thought crimes never end.
And that's what brings us back to tonight.
So let's look around the room.
Who do we have tonight?
I know.
Right now, you've just got me and Danny.
We'll allegedly have Andrew join us eventually.
We'll see.
Tyler Bowie.
America First Debate00:15:10
I'm not sure what happened to Tyler.
I have to assume Tyler.
Whenever I can't find Tyler, I always jump to the first thing that comes to mind, which is that he's been forcibly conscripted by President Trump to go fight in the Spice Wars on a different, on a distant colony planet.
I would like to know if the Spice Must Flow.
Is that true?
The Spice has definitely got to flow.
And we all know that Tyler's really passionate about the Spice flowing.
We know that he has good relations with the President's Mentats.
We know he's got a long relationship with the Spacers Guild.
And I think between all of those things, he'll be a real asset to the Spice Wars.
Has he passed the pain box as of yet?
Man, did you ever see if he did that?
Do you know if Tyler ever passed the pain box?
I'm being honest with you.
I don't know what the Spice Wars.
You don't know what the Spice Wars or the Pain Box is.
That's going to get you conscripted to fight in the Spice Wars and not in like a cool Sardaukar regiment.
You're probably just going to be thrown into like the meat grinder.
Well, all right, sign me up then.
I mean, you are an Ohio State fan.
What is the Spice Wars?
The Spice Wars.
Benny Jesuit are very disappointed.
He doesn't know what the Spice Wars are, Jack.
I don't think.
Benny Jessuit are very, very disappointed.
We can't reveal the secrets of the Bene Jazera to Danny, and he's not aware of these things.
He is certainly not the Kwiznat Tatarach.
Yes, he's not.
Yeah, this is all foreign language.
I have no idea.
A typical Ohio State fan.
Anyway, so we'll have to just jump in here.
It has nothing to do with current events whatsoever.
Just so disappointing.
What does have something to do with current events, though, is our first topic.
Everyone knows what the biggest event of the past few weeks is and or the past, well, definitely the past week.
And it is, of course, our venture going down in Iran.
We aren't going to get into the details of whether we should have gone now, what the politics of it are.
We wanted to discuss a very specific version of this, which is the topic of what's always used with this administration, the line, America first.
And specifically, what does America first mean?
Does America first mean specifically America only, America alone, America as sole focus of all things?
Or can America first, does that imply it can be first among other things?
And there's a heady debate about that.
We were passing this clip around as we discussed what to say about this.
And I think a guy who's played a leading role in defining what America first is is, of course, the president's aide, Stephen Miller.
Let's look at what he had to say about this on just a matter of days ago, 640.
I don't think that people understand the Trump doctrine is not isolationism.
Maybe you can help set them straight because I'm not too effective, I guess.
The president has made clear that he believes America's awesome military might should be used to protect and defend America's interests.
Not to surrender the world to our adversaries, to our enemies, to those who would do us harm, not to surrender the world's resources, lanes of commerce, or capacity to keep our citizens safe.
No, America first means America will be the greatest, most unquestioned, unmatched power in the world.
So, that's kind of part of the debate is a lot of, I do feel, Jack, and maybe you agree, that maybe in kind of in the beginning of the Trump surge, 2016-2020 range, where America first was getting thrown around a lot in politics, a lot of it actually, it did, let's be frank, it had something of a isolationist streak to it or a breakaway thing, that the time for putting America first meant a time of pulling back, pulling away from a lot of international obligations.
The idea was that a lot of foreign adventures constituted putting the rest of the world first, and that putting America first meant refocusing on America.
Now, Stephen Miller's MAGRA credentials are pretty impeccable, I would say.
And he's pushing the line now that America First, it almost means a revival of Cold War levels of American dominance.
That it does mean preserving an American empire or American respect, American primacy.
And is there a conflict between those things?
Especially, I guess, does it work as long as we are maintaining border security, for example?
Yeah, the thing that trips people up there is when he said American interests.
And that's more so, like, whose interests are we talking about here?
Because that's where, especially my generation gets caught up in with what, like, Marco Rubio said the other day when we say American interest.
Is that really America First?
Are we kind of redefining the term and creating new interests within the movement that quote unquote now fall under America First?
So that's where definitely young men are pretty upset right now about that.
I am just cracking up because in the chat, someone wrote, after Blake drank all of that Strong Cell, I'm looking forward to see him coming on TPOSA with a three-foot-tall beehive hairdo.
Look, it says you need Blake for did I miss something?
Did you OD on Strong Cell?
No, I've just been, I've just been diligently drinking my Strong Cell every day, Jack.
Unlike, you know, Andrew went to D.C., he went to the State of the Union.
He didn't bring Strong Cell with him.
I think he reset the timer for all progress.
Yeah, I think he's following the rules.
And so he's lost the verve.
Whereas I think I'm about one week out.
And my expectation is that I will close my eyes one night and I shall wake up the next day with a full rich head of luscious hair.
I think it'll happen.
I believe.
But Jack, yeah, I'm going to take the question.
Not to dodge the question, although I certainly am adept at doing so.
No, look, there's no question America First was always originally deployed as an answer to the neocon sort of neoliberal policy of the day.
Keep in mind that if you go back to 2015, 2016, if you go back to that timeframe, the United States was still involved heavily in Afghanistan.
The United States still had troops in Iraq and Syria where we were fighting ISIS.
The United States was involved in all of these conflicts all around the world.
And America First meant building the wall.
It meant putting the interests of Americans first.
It meant taking the focus away from the federal government's focus away from foreign conflicts and focusing it on the American people and the American homeland.
There's no question that's what America First always meant, Americans first when it first was deployed.
So when I hear America First also being deployed is saying, well, wait, that doesn't necessarily mean that America is going to be last in the world.
I think there isn't necessarily a contradiction in terms there because you mentioned Stephen Miller because he's the guy who's been out front and center every single day defending ICE, defending Homeland Security, which obviously we saw some changeover today, defending the agents in the field and conducting whatever he can in terms of deportation operations.
So as you say, Stephen Miller is a guy who absolutely doesn't have any questionable credentials when it comes to MA or when it comes to these issues.
But at the same time, I think that the bigger debate, whether we get into a semantics debate about rhetoric, the bigger debate is should America be isolationist or should America actually care about some of these things like influence in the wider world.
And that's a debate that I've seen a lot of people get into.
I'd love to see, by the way, if people want to get into the chat that we're into right now, you know, please go ahead, send in your Rumble Rants, send in your comments.
We're looking at it because we are live.
I'm seeing your chats right there.
Right here, President, right here, Dylan Ivey says he had it in his 2017 inauguration speech.
He said it twice.
I remember America First preserves American culture.
And it certainly does.
This is a huge part of America First, American excellence.
And look, at the end of the day, when it comes to these things like the Middle East, when it comes to these things like the others, I'm certainly not someone who's a proponent of these forever wars.
I'm certainly not someone who's a proponent of all of these things.
And I don't think that Charlie was.
We obviously have seen Charlie's tweets and statements on it.
But at the same time, we don't necessarily want China and Russia just taking over the entire world, do we, Blake?
No, we don't.
And I think what we do underrate is America did get, we looked at a lot of the negatives because those were particularly severe in the Bush years and the Obama years.
The downsides of American global power is it's like, oh, it just seems to be our job to perpetually have troops in dump countries like Afghanistan.
It's perpetually our job to pony up tens of billions of dollars, practically to have nations just kind of on the dole from us.
I think that was really highlighted with the U.S. AID stuff that happened last spring where people flipped out because they learned, wait, we just spend $50 billion a year to basically be propping up programs that like no one else in the world is funding.
Like no one, supposedly it was an atrocity for us to defend USAID, but the European Union didn't replace that funding.
So I guess they didn't think it was important enough to do and so on.
But we do get benefits from being the top dog around from having a lot of countries that matter looking to us.
We look at that with the US dollar being in the position that it is.
And that if the U.S. dollar went away, I've seen people say it would be like if U.S. GDP just sort of shrunk 5% overnight because that's the value of the dollar.
Or the fact that us being so central to the defense of a lot of countries, that did enable President Trump to use a lot of his tariff leverage on them.
That South Korea, Japan, Europe, they can't just tell us to buzz off if we decide to pick a trade fight because they are reliant on us in so many ways.
Now, well, we saw that with Spain within the last two days where they said we couldn't use their bases.
Then Trump says, okay, we're no longer going to trade with you.
And now they've cradled right away.
Yeah, exactly.
So there is real value to being an assertive top dog.
And you have to, one has to be very careful in the path one charts under that.
And I do think President Trump has been a lot more careful about that than prior administrations.
Yeah.
And the main problem with all of this has really been messaging, in my opinion.
The best defense of us attacking them that I've heard was Steve Witkoff when he was on Fox.
And for some reason, we hadn't heard that line before from anybody else, which makes no sense to me because if they really had enough uranium to make 11 nukes, I feel like that would have been the top issue that would have persuaded people to being supportive of this.
So I really think the messaging has been the problem, how we're kind of all over the place.
And that's really causing a lot of the discomfort among people who maybe don't want us to get involved.
Yeah, look, I'll say, and I've said this a number of times, that the president of the United States is his own best messenger.
He's his own best influencer.
He's his own best spokesman.
And that's nothing against Caroline or Witkoff or Stephen Miller or Pete Hegseth or any of these guys.
They're JD.
They're all phenomenal in their own right.
But there's only one Donald J. Trump.
And you saw the tour de force that he gave at the State of the Union.
He got high marks from everyone on the State of the Union.
Even CNN's panel said this was a great state of the union.
And the Venezuela operation, I'll point out, and as I've said over and over, was something that was celebrated at the State of the Union.
It had its own section.
It had a medal of honor associated with it.
It was given high billing because of its level of success.
And that was something where, again, that was an international operation.
Now, of course, that was in our hemisphere.
So that was kind of a little bit closer to the Don Rowe doctrine, if you will, as opposed to the Middle East.
But at the same time, that's something where President Trump was able to smartly and swiftly get the United States involved in something overseas, then pull back with the success, come home with the W and create a new deal that benefited the United States economically.
And a lot of people have been hoping for that same type of Venezuela model when it comes vis-a-vis vis-a-vis Iran, where the leader has already been taken out.
Now, at the same time, people want to hear that.
And Danny, to your point, people want to hear that from the president.
They want to see that moment of the president of the United States behind the desk, the resolute desk of the Oval Office, giving that address directly to the American people.
And I think people are hoping and expecting a moment like that from their president to hear directly from the top what the game plan is, what the objective is.
And if this is going to be longer than a couple of days, longer than a couple of weeks, the American people want to hear that from their president.
There's no question.
But Danny, I'd love to ask you again: you know, you mentioned, you know, younger people and their sort of view of this.
I know that Blake, you and Andrew had interviewed some turning point chapter leaders and chapter members the other day, or I guess it was earlier today on the show.
And, you know, I just wanted to kind of hear, so, Danny, like when you're when you're talking, doesn't necessarily have to be TPSA people, but just people in general.
You know, when it comes to foreign intervention, foreign wars, we know that Charlie always said that that's something that younger voters, younger members of the coalition were just totally not interested in because they wanted to focus on domestic, they wanted to focus on economic relief.
What are you hearing from them?
Yeah, I'm hearing a lot of opposition to this, and especially because of Marco Rubio's comments.
I mean, it's no secret that Gen Z is very anti-Israel and more so.
Yeah, more so.
I'm here now, Jack.
Doesn't want to get involved.
So a lot of thumbs.
Breaking the jacket rule again.
Ah, yeah, get it off.
Take it off.
Now, while he takes that one off, we did get a rumble rant from Jay McGuire in 1995.
Cut the camera away from him.
We can't show that.
There's children who watch this show.
So he says, as a 30-year-old, I don't want war.
However, this Iran war is America first, as Iran is a direct threat when they are directly saying death to America while building a nuke with intent to use it on us.
Although another guy in the chat is just saying, he's pointing out chanting, he says chanting is not a threat.
I don't know, is chanting a threat?
Listen, I think that you could definitely make an American first argument for this, but I am very cognizant of the fact that young people don't love it.
I mean, they just don't.
We sold President Trump on campus.
Charlie did, as the peace president, as the anti-war president.
Nuclear Posture Debate00:08:26
I'm already getting comfortable with the fact that this could have been the right geopolitical national security decision, right?
Especially after we talked to Matt Van Swaul this morning talking about how basically I learned something this morning.
Jack probably already knew it because he likes to study these things, but it basically takes the same amount of time to go from zero to 5% enriched uranium as it does from basically 5% to 60%.
So that first 5% is all you need to actually make nuclear energy from.
He basically said there's no good reason to enrich uranium up to 60% unless you're trying to do something nefarious with it or a deterrence, whatever.
You know, I'm actually open to the fact that Iran could have been more of a rational actor when it came to nuclear energy than most people believe.
But regardless, they'd made threats.
They wanted it to be a deterrent factor, maybe an offensive factor.
Big story.
Big point, rather.
It could be the absolute right call from a national security perspective and the absolute worst political decision you could make.
Sometimes in life, you're forced with those types of decisions.
And I think, you know, we might just be in one of those conundrums right now.
Yeah, I think it's, I will say, I mean, we have people in the chat who are saying, like, it's just not true that they were building the nuke.
And what I will say is, I don't know what is true.
It is harder for them to make the case because I know and you know that they've been six months away from making a nuclear bomb.
Well, I was missing the fact that they told us that they annihilated like all their facilities and everything in June.
Yeah, but then they told Witkoff and Jared Kushner that they were material to make.
But no one else has used that talking point other than Witkoff, which leads me to believe.
And Jared.
Yeah, I'm actually.
What?
You think they just couldn't?
I don't know.
I would think that Rubio would have been starting with that because that feels like the best talking point by a mile over Israel was going to Israel was going in first, so we should go in.
I feel like it's much better.
Andrew, let me run, if I can, what I said before in front of Andrew, because, and this is what I've said, because obviously there have been messaging challenges on all of this.
And my response to all of that, whether you have the Witkoff stuff and you have the Rubio stuff and all the rest of it, I said, well, I think the thing that the American people are waiting for is that moment where the President of the United States delivers an address from the Obolo office.
That would be the way to cut through all this.
Yeah.
And it has to be really, really well crafted messaging because I agree there is a little bit of, well, they had nukes and they were going to make nukes, but we've been being told they're going to make nukes for a long time.
I mean, I think that they might have just candidly had a posture where they're like, we're not going to go full nuke, but we just want to be close enough to be, like, make them nervous.
That could have been like their position.
sounds bizarre to me like you either well because they but they knew there was a red line Being in that position is the most dangerous one to be in.
You should either have no nuke or you should have the actual nuke.
It doesn't mean that they wouldn't have made that decision because the entirety of the international apparatus was arrayed against them to not get a nuke.
Okay, so they maybe knew that that was a red line, but they wanted to be close enough to be dangerous and to make them nervous.
Maybe that was their stated deterrent position.
I'm just saying it makes a lot of sense that they had material to make nuclear warheads or dirty bombs, which you could do it at 60 to 80% enrichment, apparently, 70%.
And there's some indication that they used it in Iraq in 2020 already.
I haven't seen that confirmed.
I saw it was Catherine Herridge that reported that, I believe.
But so here's the thing.
The arguments are layered, though.
Yeah, maybe they didn't want to lead with the nuke because of the point that you were saying, Blake, that, you know, we've been told this for decades and it's never really materialized.
But the idea about the missiles in the intercontinental ICBMs, though, I mean, they were building up an arsenal and a stockpile of missiles that could have been.
No, we have that graph too, 504, if we still have that.
But they do not have ICBMs.
They have, what are they?
They were asking for hypersonics from the CCM.
I know that.
They're still not ICBMs.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Fair enough.
I mean, IRBMs, intermediate range, they do a lot of.
IR, MR, and SR.
Yeah, so here's the graph.
Iranian missile stockpile versus U.S. interceptor capacity.
And so another part of the calculus could have just been this graph, right?
That they were going to get further and further, you know, they were going to increase their ability to outpace our production to intercept those as a defensive posture.
So, you know, there's a lot of money.
Well, keep in mind that Iran also has an increased capacity for the Shahed drones and drone swarms, which has been built up because of the Iraq, or excuse me, the Ukraine war.
And those drones, which you've now seen, if you go look at Bahrain and UAE, it almost looks like Iran has switched from the ballistic missile posture to more of a drone attack posture because they can send some money, or we're probably going to be cheaper to see, you know, they're cheaper, and you're probably going to start to see layered attacks because these air interceptors are so much more expensive.
But at the same time, you've got to try to use them as much as possible to take out whatever you can.
Meanwhile, you've got the kamikaze drones that could just slip right in.
We talked about this so much when we were talking about the context of the Ukraine war.
Now they're using it in a sort of a counter-offensive counter-strike method.
And it's very successful against air defense.
It's sort of the answer to smart weapons is dumb weapons.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth in what you're saying.
And I think that could have motivated the reason for the rationale for going now.
I think the central question, though, is not about air power superiority.
I think we've got that established.
We can do what we want from the air.
The question and why this could continue dragging on is why, you know, how much popular support did the Ayatollah and the IRGC and the regime have in Iran?
And that is a question.
And then if it's low, how much muscle memory is baked into the population after they just slaughtered 20 or 30,000 protesters that came out?
Like there could just be a function here where they're so scared to come out after getting 30,000 of them killed, they're not sure what happens next.
Are they going to go out on the street and then they're going to get bombed by the RGC?
Also, how would they organize?
How do you organize?
Like, how do you cause the dominoes to start falling to oust the regime?
And I think that feels muddy to me.
It feels very unclear how you start a popular uprising, even with the air power raining down on the RRGC and the regime.
I just don't know.
Whatever happened.
Whatever happened.
We had a lot of air security in Afghanistan for 20 years.
Correct.
Didn't cause the regime change.
Well, and we did boost on the ground, right?
Yeah, and we did get regime change, but it wasn't a peaceful thing.
We caused, you know, there was sectarian.
We need a mass aground invasion.
Yeah, I'm just saying, like, even with that, it depends on the nature of the country itself.
Like, is Iran a country that could basically just, at this point, peacefully turn over leadership?
Or is there 40% of the country that's going to hang on for dear life?
And we've been, you know, Blake and I kept talking about this.
We had these Iranians that would come on the show during the popular uprising, during the protests.
And we asked ourselves after it was done, we're like, was this an op?
Like, are we getting spun?
And, you know, it was unclear to us because they were all basically saying nobody likes the regime.
Nobody likes the IRGC.
And everybody loves this Pavla, whatever his name.
I always forget.
What's his name?
Reza Pallavi.
Reza Pallavi.
And Blake and I were like.
Yeah, we just got endless.
We just got endless stuff where it's like, I saw the funniest one, which was a thread online that was like, it was like, ask me anything.
I'm inside Iran.
And like every other answer, he's finding ways like, we're all just waiting for the Shah to order us to go into the streets.
Yeah, okay, bud.
Okay, bud.
Hi, folks.
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Insider Bets on War Crisis00:09:14
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But another thing we want to hit here, so as Dan said, Gen Z seems pretty skeptical.
We saw that with our students.
But I think another interesting populist angle of potential anger on this war, this has become, I think, the first big story, first big crisis of any kind, where we've had these modern prediction markets play such a huge role, which is we've got people casting bets on Kalchi, on Polymarket, probably on other places as well, for how the war is going to go.
And we have a disturbing amount of evidence that military insiders were able to bet on what would happen, for example, to the Ayatollah.
The New York Times had an article that I think about a thousand people were able to cast bets specifically that about a thousand people cast bets specifically that there would be bomb strikes on Iran, I believe, on Saturday, because it happened Saturday morning or Saturday afternoon in Iran.
And that was way more than any surrounding day.
It's not just that a ton of people are betting.
It was clear a ton of people had information.
Some of them made tens of thousands of dollars.
Some of them, I think, made half a million dollars or more.
Some people really cashed in on this.
And there's two possible answers.
One is there's people who are really good at reading the signals, maybe in terms of radio traffic, internet traffic.
Like they can see the signs when a military strike is about to happen.
Or we can do the much more direct thing, which is it's currently not even illegal to insider trade on this sort of thing.
And you might have people in our admin, people elsewhere in the government, people in foreign admins, people in foreign militaries.
And they got the news, this is going down.
And the first thing they did was they opened up a prediction market and they said, yeah, I'm going to bet $10,000 that we bomb tomorrow.
Yeah, it was 158 accounts placed hundreds of bets of at least $1,000 or more.
Were they all in the Pentagon?
Yeah, it would have had to be.
I don't know.
Yeah, like who would even be the most obvious actors here?
Jack, did you place a bet?
Did you do it?
You've got good sources.
I don't gamble.
And, you know, I've actually kind of been racking my brain about this for a while now.
And I just, I just, I don't have like a prohibition against gambling.
I just don't do it.
And I'm sorry, but these prediction markets are just gambling.
They're just online gambling.
It's online betting.
There's no question.
But this is the same thing.
And so, no, this is insider trading on kind of questions of importance.
And there's like two levels of badness.
I don't, I mean, I don't think it had to have been insider training.
Say this because, on human events, I didn't have any specific inside knowledge that the bombing was going to start on on uh, saturday.
But we told everybody that and you know we went and and Andrew, you know, I remember, you know you went and like kind of said hey, let's all sort of be around the don't go too far from the studio this weekend.
So like we, we kind of had a sense that things were up.
It's more so the thousand dollars or more, I was gonna say it's one thing to say, Be available if stuff goes off.
It's another thing to put money down, like real money.
No, no, no, no, I'm not disagreeing.
I'm just saying there are ways you could have done it, devil's advocate, but yeah, this doesn't seem like that.
I think there's but Blake brings up a good point.
This is like not a regulated industry.
You know, this is like, it's not necessarily illegal to do this.
And I've brought this up a few times before, and I'm just waiting because you create disturbing incentives when you can bet on this sort of thing.
Because as an example, let's say President Trump was super 50-50 on whether to do it.
And a guy is like, I can make a lot of money if I can make a bombing happen tomorrow.
And he tilts the president a certain way.
He's one of his advisors who says the best time to hit us tomorrow, not on Monday.
And that doesn't have to be on war stuff.
It could be, imagine a guy who places a bunch of bets.
Let's say Justice Alito retires from the Supreme Court and there's five favorites and like some long shot and the guy, it's some guy who advises the president bets $1,000, $10,000 on this 1% long shot.
And then he just endlessly lobbies the president on that specific guy, not because he'll be the best justice, but because that guy could make a ton of money.
But obviously it's most worrying on military stuff because let's say Iran has guys watching these markets and they're able to see, oh, a crap load of money just came in on a strike happening tomorrow.
Yeah, I actually have it.
On Friday morning, it was at 7% that we strike and then it closed Friday night at 26%.
So we went from 7% to 26% just Friday alone.
I'm just going to say, I think a straightforward thing we should say is like, if you are betting on a U.S. military operation based on insider knowledge, we should treat that the same way we treat any other espionage, deliberately leaking U.S. military intel.
And I'm a bit of an authoritarian.
I would say, you know, if you do that, bam, firing squad.
Oh, come on.
You would actually leak in U.S. military intelligence?
I mean, that's true.
That's true.
Okay, okay.
It would actually be a good way to sow deception, though.
So if Secretary Hegset is watching this, you know, and we're about to launch another round of strikes or something, you should deliberately bet money on like the wrong day or something and just show this huge spike going up on one day so that, you know, perhaps our adversaries think, oh my gosh, this is going to be the day they move things out of place, but then that actually isn't the day.
And then you strike the day before or something like that.
Oh, that's for sure real.
But I would point out that's kind of like you can have fake spies, fake double agents, fake leaks of intelligence, but you still have to very sharply punish real leaks of intelligence.
Absolutely.
That's interesting.
So Foz is bringing up a good point.
You can use crypto on these prediction markets, which means there's a level of anonymity, right?
So senators introduced a bill to ban officials from trading on prediction markets.
Jeff Merkley from Oregon and Amy Klobuchar, so two Democrats.
I don't know.
I kind of think it's right up there with banning stock trading, to be honest.
Which we should probably members of Congress.
But it's both, in a lot of ways, it's more sinister because you can have a direct financial incentive to just on any potential policy thing.
Like, okay, you know, this company will benefit from Congress's regulatory actions.
That's bad, and we know Congress does it.
But now we're just on the level of whether we go to war or not is substantially based on how much one can insider trade on what the decision we reach is.
That's really spooky.
Yeah, I actually think you're right.
The more I'm thinking about this, the more we really need to kind of clamp down on this because as a matter of fact, the banning stock trading, we should just do it all together as one bill.
Ban officials trading on prediction markets.
Yeah, and officials, I just get generally concerned about the amount that the way these prediction markets let you corrupt the process of government.
And I think it's just a ticking time bomb until we have a really bad scandal related to it.
Like, this is almost marginal.
There's a really huge one that we could have, and it's going to eventually occur.
A funny spin-off of this, by the way, is that they had betting markets on Calchi about whether the Supreme Leader, Kamenei, would be out by March 1st.
And a lot of people were betting on that, possibly because they knew a strike would be hitting him.
And Calchi has announced that actually that was only related to him leaving office.
Ah, you can't bet on that.
They can't bet on a death because that would create bad incentives.
And so they say they are not fulfilling the contract for...
They're just returning the money, right?
They're just going to return the money, and they're not letting people collect their winnings on him getting turned into, you know, pavement paint.
Got him on a technicality.
Got him on a technicality.
That would be super bum.
That would bum you out, though.
Imagine like Lindsey Graham betting on something like that.
I bet he would have put a grip down on that and then not getting the payout.
Kurds and Persians Clash00:09:10
Poor Lindsey.
By the way, can we just talk about this guy for okay?
Lindsey Graham, this guy is like frothing at the mouth, just like, let's bomb more.
Let's like remove more dictators and regime change.
And For the life of me, I do not know why they let this man behind the camera.
Why do they let this guy behind the microphone?
Why?
If you are wanting popular support for this war, you should put a clampdown order on Lindsey Graham because every time the man talks, like, I cringe.
And it doesn't matter what good point that he may be making.
I just can't listen to it anymore.
That's my rant.
Well, now we're going a talks of Cuba.
Oh, now, so, yeah.
Well, listen, I think the whole point with Cuba is that you would maybe be able that apparently after Venezuela fell, Cuba's probably.
Yeah, well, and also Cuba's, I mean, affects us so much more than Iran, which is 7,000 miles away.
Cuba's 90 miles from Florida.
Yeah, and by the way, you know, I do think that there is a case to be made that Cuba could fall just all on its own.
Yeah.
People don't, and maybe Jack, you might know this because you spent some time in Cuba, but the Cuban intelligence services are still one of the most highly regarded in the entire world.
Like the whole country sucks, but like the one thing that they have that is pretty effective is their Intel op.
It's the only thing they put their money into.
It's like their biggest export.
It's their biggest.
They sell it to Venezuela.
Yeah, they sell it.
It didn't help them much there.
No, well, it's true.
No, there's no question that the Cuban government, the Cuban communist regime has been definitely weakened for the first time since, I guess, the 1950s.
You don't have a Castro in office, right?
And so this is a time where the cult of personality around the Castro family isn't necessarily there in the way that it was.
It's something that's clearly right off the coast of the United States.
It's something where, look, it's our oldest overseas base is Guantanamo Bay, where it's been a year.
Since 1898, there was talk about annexing it after the Spanish-American War.
There's lots of arguments that America should have done this.
I'm actually kind of partial to some of those arguments.
Again, that's, you know, hypothetical alternate history type stuff.
You know, obviously, past is unchangeable at this point, but at the same time, it would clearly be much, much more in America's interests to have a friendly government there in Cuba.
There's no question.
And it honestly would be in Cuba's interest too.
Monroe doctrine.
This is our hemisphere.
Yes.
Listen, I have one frame of reference for far-flung wars in the Middle East.
I have a whole other frame of reference for wars in our hemisphere, or at least Havana is like 90 miles from Miami, right?
It's like right there.
Yeah, I'm not saying I want to go invade just like I saw Danny give me the stink guy.
I'm not trying to go invade Cuba.
I'm just saying the interests are a lot easier to sell.
Well, yeah, and that's an easier thing to sell to the American people than Iran just because of its proximity to the United States, Cuba.
Blake?
Invade?
I just don't.
I just feel like Iran is like 150.
Okay, is it 1960?
Cuba, Cuba just is like a dump.
If we overthrew it, this would be a classic case of where we'd suddenly be suckered into giving them $20 billion.
It's just this decrepit place.
It has an average age of like 50.
Almost every, anyone who can get out of that country is left.
Who cares?
We've talked about Iran plausibly being this like Cold War hangover that all these 65-year-olds remember the hostage crisis and want to do something.
Iran is that on steroids, not Iran.
Cuba is that on steroids.
It's people who are still mad about the Bay of Pigs and maybe the JFK assassination might have involved it.
They haven't done anything lately.
They're just sucking.
The only thing they have are good baseball players.
And we get them to come here.
Yeah.
I mean, listen, here's the thing.
This is what I'm saying.
Lindsey Graham needs to shut his yapper.
Stop talking.
Get him out of the view of a camera for the love.
I know this is a free country.
But if I'm the Trump administration, I'm telling Lindsey Graham, stop talking.
You are only harming the cause.
That's all I'm saying.
All right.
We're going to get off the war here in a sec, but there was a question for Jack from Sandra Gebhart.
Jack, can you explain war, meaning we've been successful with quick attacks?
Why do we need to keep going in now?
I know it's not cut and dry, but there is a chance we can be done quick.
I'm reading this again.
Why do we need to keep going in now?
I know it's not cut and dry, but is there a chance we can be done quick?
And yeah, I mean, I'm not exactly sure what the question is, but I guess I'll explain it in terms of this.
You know, the difference here between Venezuela and Iran is the difference in regimes.
So in Venezuela, you had a durable regime, but at the same time, you had you have a lot more influence to bear and a single, singular person who's really in charge of that regime being, you know, in the case of that, Nicolas Maduro and someone, Del Codriguez, who was willing to work with the United States.
In the case of Iran, it's much more of a mixed bag.
And I was on Piers Morgan with like Tim Miller and some people, and they were like laughing about this.
And I was trying to explain to them that, you know, in Iran, it is mixed leadership.
It's a decentralized revolutionary regime where you have the IRGC military, you know, secret military, religious police kind of thing, which we don't really have a cognate for in the United States.
We have the civilian leadership in terms of the president, the foreign minister, and then, of course, the Ayatollah and the system of mullahs and now the Ayatollah son, who may or may not have taken over.
And so it's not like you can just change out one person and suddenly they, you know, become pro-U.S.
It's just not like that.
They've also had much, much longer to be in power and have always been since 1979, a revolutionary state for 47 years.
And so they built up all of these institutions.
They built up all of this power, all of this internal domestic control for the Islamic government.
They just don't have the same type of government that a secular state would have.
This is also actually kind of the reason that they didn't always work with the communists, right?
Because the communists were seen as atheists.
And so even though they were roughly aligned with the Soviet Union during those years, they weren't necessarily super pro-Soviet Union either.
They also supported the Islamists and the Mujahajin in Afghanistan for the same reason.
So, you know, perhaps it would have been better for their regime to have done so, but they're very fiercely independent.
They're very hard to work with.
And they are, for lack of a better term, actually Islamic jihadists and radicals.
You know, most people don't understand the ethnicities, how many ethnicities there are in Iran.
Yeah, there's a lot.
I was just looking at this, though.
Iran is a diverse, multi-ethnic nation.
It's diverse.
It's 90 million people, with ethnic Persians constituting the majority, approximately 61%.
Other major ethnic groups include the Azeris, 16%, Kurds, 10%, the Lurs, 6%, Baloch, Arabs, and various Turkic tribes, such as Turkmen and Kashkai.
So this is a, I mean, this is, whereas Venice, okay, New World is different than old world.
New world, you got Venezuela.
It's got this like national identity.
They kind of fall in line, even though they might have different mixes of European and indigenous or whatever.
This is something different.
This is old world stuff where these people have really deeply entrenched identities.
And that's why you get factionalism.
That's why you get this tribalism.
That's why when there's a power vacuum, this tribe fights that tribe and this group, you know, goes.
I will say, my understanding from people I've talked to is a lot of these groups are basically still just Persians.
Like that on your map here, you've got these purple guys along the Caspian Sea.
They're totally just Persian.
I think you're right.
I tend to agree with that, but it's still the Kurds are very different than, you know, and yeah, the Kurds I would put aside, but Persian identity, right?
The Persian Empire is an ancient state.
So it already had sort of this identity as a country in the sense that just in a different way that Iraq and Afghanistan never really had because there was this Persian empire identity that they all sort of had to begin with.
So it isn't necessary, you're not necessarily going to see the same level of separatism as you would in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Now, the Kurds, obviously, I wouldn't necessarily put in that same bucket, but at the same time, there's real questions as to whether or not the Kurds are interested in going out against the Iranian army.
Why We Left Luigi00:13:18
I agree.
I think the bigger question is how much popular support does the regime still have?
And nobody can give me an answer.
By the way, we got a question.
You can see videos, by the way, of people marching in Tahir Square with pictures of the Ayatollah carrying flags of the regime.
Again, martyrdom is massive in Shia Islam to understand the power of giving them a martyr, someone who died for the Islamic Revolution, someone who died at the hands of the great Satan and the little Satan.
The U.S.-Israeli joint regime.
Again, putting it in their words.
So they're certainly viewing him as a holy martyr.
They're certainly viewing him as someone to uphold.
And it's going to galvanize supporters of the regime in the same way that it may also lend some credibility to the opposition.
I hear what you're saying, Jack.
We got a comment from old Floridian says, you guys need to talk to Robbie Dawkins about what's going on inside Iran.
We actually had Robbie on the Charlie Girk show and got a lot of emails about him.
And I've known Robbie for years.
He's a good dude.
He's very bullish, though.
And yes, he's in-country.
He says the popular uprising is going to materialize.
In Iran International, they're circling Sunday at the break of dawn that people are going to hit the streets.
I hope all of that's true.
I'm just really skeptical because you might not want to tell the ROGC that.
Yeah, I mean, exactly.
So anyways, here we go.
All right.
That's my thoughts.
Well, before we move on from prediction markets, Blake, I was just wondering if we could get a prediction market going on if Strong Cell will grow your hair back.
And if so, what is the highway eyebrow right here?
I am 100% confident that I shall have a completely luscious and full head of hair.
He's got to be a sprouter right there.
There's a sprouter right there.
He shall bloom forth like flowers in the desert or something.
Before he ever stepped behind a microphone, Charlie understood something important.
Leadership begins with learning.
He didn't chase a diploma or a title.
He chased truth.
Through Hillsdale College's free online courses, he studied the great works of the classics, the principles of the American founding, and the life-changing truths of the Bible.
Those ideas didn't just inform him.
They shaped his character, strengthened his convictions, and prepared him for the challenges ahead.
One of the courses he took was the Genesis story, taught by Hillsdale professor Dr. Justin Jackson.
This free online course explores the relationship between God and man, what happens when that relationship is broken, and the path toward reconciliation.
It's a real college course, rigorous, thoughtful, and accessible to anyone willing to learn.
You can take the very same course completely free.
Grow stronger in your faith, gain clarity about humanity and your place in the world.
Prepare yourself for a life with courage and conviction.
Visit charlieforhillsdale.com to enroll today.
That's charlieforhillsdale.com.
Learn deeply.
Lead boldly.
Carry it forward.
But we have a very important topic that has nothing to do with Iran.
It has nothing to do with Cuba, mercifully.
And that is Luigi the Musical.
Oh, not Mario's brother, that other Luigi.
Luigi Man G O Ne.
I think Jack should go to the opening night and do Man on the Street.
I want to go to the opening night.
Blake and Jack need to go.
The thing is, I just kind of want to see the musical.
Yeah, we have clips.
I'm not sure if this is a clip from the musical or just about it.
It just says clip, but I think we've got to see it.
It is $4.60,000.
Can I get a soap and some towels, I guess?
Yeah, let's just check your balance, Mangione.
It looks like it is $400,000.
Wait, what?
What?
What are you talking about?
What do you mean?
Where is that coming from?
It looks like a couple of places.
Nopes for healthcare reform.
Bottoms United for Luigi.
This last Lindsey Graham?
Okay, I saw that clip earlier.
I didn't understand.
Foz was like, oh, good tie-in for the next clip.
And I didn't catch it.
But I actually LOL'd at the Lindsey Group.
Lindsey Graham.
So that was an excerpt from, I suppose, not a song.
What are the musical numbers in this game?
I have no idea, but the San Fran looked fabulous.
Yeah, so for those who couldn't see it, they had Luigi in an orange jumpsuit.
So I guess I think the context is that must be him after he's been arrested.
Yeah, he's getting their donation.
He's got a show and you buy supplies and they check your, you know.
Yeah.
Anyways, I think, Jack, I think you should start.
I mean, look, this is disgusting.
There's no question.
And this is, it just goes to show you that the actual rise of support for Bolshevik activity is absolutely alive and well in the United States.
Not only, no, so not only do we see the sort of transformation of Luigi Maggioni into a folk hero who is an assassin, by the way, who shot and killed someone in cold blood murder on the street on video, that we've also seen the, I can't believe we're showing the video.
We've seen him lose the access to the death penalty.
I think the death penalty has been stripped in both cases now, the state and federal case, which he's facing.
And by the way, he shows no remorse for his actions.
He was lashing out in court just a couple of days ago when he was in his last hearing.
So it certainly shows no remorse.
Tyler Robinson also shows no remorse, by the way, smirking and laughing in his court hearings.
And you see, Maggioni, also, I think they took away his murder charge in one of the cases.
I'm trying to remember off the top of my head, but it's the way that this has been handled in the courts is completely insane.
Public opinion is absolutely playing a role here.
The judiciary is, by and large, in agreement with Antifa activity here.
And, you know, what can I say?
It's, it's, it's Sacco and Vanzetti got what they deserved, and Luigi deserves exactly the same.
And yet here we are 100 years later, and we just can't seem to deal with these Italian anarchists anymore.
A little swipe at the attack.
I'm looking at whether it's any good.
And I guess so the San How does San Francisco run now?
It's just, it's running in New York, only a few blocks away from where the murder was committed.
A theater critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, which I guess something called a newspaper.
I don't know if those, I didn't know those existed still, but so this Lila Janiak said, if only the show itself could justify the hype, bringing national attention to the often underappreciated Bay Area theater scene.
Unfortunately, it just isn't any good.
Which I've got to say, how can San Francisco, like, how do they produce a bad musical?
If there's, I feel like if any town has enough, you know.
Remember the Gay Men's Choir?
I was just about to say that people who should be able to produce good musicals, it should be San Francisco.
Where is that that musical?
We're coming for your kids.
Yeah, it's coming for your children.
Gay San Francisco.
Yeah.
You'd think that, yeah.
That wasn't any good either.
It was just shockingly horrific.
So it says the musical, a satirical prison comedy inspired by the bizarre, true story.
It's not bizarre.
It's murderous.
It's disgusting.
Of three high-profile inmates housed together at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, sold out its preview run.
It is now adding news.
Part comedy, part social commentary, Luigi the Musical reimagines larger-than-life public figures as exaggerated characters representing three disillusioned pillars of American life.
Healthcare, Hollywood, and tech.
Luigi the Musical uses comedy to bring deeper questions to the surface, says director and co-creator Nova Bradford.
But it says Luigi the Musical doesn't glorify violence.
It interrogates it.
Oh, God.
That's there.
That's there.
We need a ban on using the word interrogate in describing anything that is not the police questioning somebody because they do that.
That's a total college postmodern world word.
Yeah, so would they do a J6 musical?
Would they say, oh, J6, which, you know, where no one died, no one was killed on J6.
No one was killed by MAGA, right, on J6.
Ashley Babbitt died, you know, the protester who died.
No, because they would lose their minds if anyone did something like that.
But if you do a Luigi Maggioni uh musical where Luigi Maggioni is clearly, by the way, the protagonist of this thing, where he's sympathetic and anti-hero.
It's a comedy that, yeah, he's he's they're basically, I don't even think they're giving him an anti-hero arc.
I think they're just showing him as a hero.
Yeah, they're just they're just making him like the hero and everyone's a celebrity.
And he's just what if they made an I wonder if he's actually getting any money out of this thing.
Probably not because I think it would be illegal for him to get it under Son of Sam.
Yeah, there's that act that's I forget what the name of the law is, but you can't benefit from it.
The actual son of Sam sold his memoirs, I believe.
Son of Sam law.
Yeah, that's right.
So yeah, so here we got the clip.
It's 635.
Let's play it.
Saturday Night Live does this all the time, which is why we lead it into satire.
Satire you have to take to an extreme so people know this is not about the people.
It's about the themes that we're interrogating.
The reaction, I think, about whether we were in the right to be creating art in this way also overlooks the fact that we are all kind of exposed to frequent information and takes on these things all the time.
There is a lot of violence surrounding us right now.
And of course, we are not, our intention is never going to be to make a mockery of that.
Ever.
We would never make it.
Every single person was gay.
all three of them were gay mafia people did that guy here's the issue Did that first guy have like a Hitler mustache?
He kind of looked like he did.
No, that's just a San Francisco gay men's choir mustache.
So zoom in on that.
We need to zoom in on the slider produced.
We should look back at that.
That's a toothbrush filmography or whatever.
I think that stageography.
So here's the big problem.
And I'm stealing this from Foz.
He's totally right on this.
The big problem is that there's a freaking audience for this.
We have become so unmoored from, you know, morality.
We've become so unmoored from the value of life and that life should be protected at all costs.
Okay, yeah.
You can interrogate the healthcare system without, you know, further contributing to creating a folk hero out of Luigi Maggioni, who is a cold-blooded murderer who is guilty of first-degree murder and assassination.
And, you know, what happened to Charlie, I mean, I'll never forget the clips of Charlie warning about the rise of assassination culture, only to see him become a victim of it.
And for them to do this and to completely brush it off and talk about his art and that this is some elevated thing, no.
Well, we have a graph on it.
31 is the graph that 30% of lives believe it's totally justified to commit violence.
Will live in infamy.
Disgusting.
I'll just say, you know, because I know we're all thinking it.
They would do one of these about Charlie if Tyler Robinson was, you know, more photogenic.
And yeah.
And if they could get away with it, I would literally, I would, they're, you know, they would.
I would be absolutely nuts, and I would do everything in my power to just ruin their days.
Everything in your power.
Not obviously not that legally speaking in Minecraft.
I would, I would, I would try and block it.
I would sue them.
I would, I would protest outside the venue.
But does anyone disagree?
I totally agree with you.
I agree.
I agree.
Yeah.
That they would, they, they'd be laughing about it and they would, um, they would, they would clearly be mocking Erica.
Um, there's no question about that.
We see that every day now, which is disgusting.
And they would make that a huge part of it, and it would be, it would just be turned into a huge joke.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
It's sort of like this giant mockery.
It really is.
It's making a mockery out of something extraordinarily.
I can see the reality manifesting in front of me where the show keeps playing, or they just bring it back where they successfully meme this so hard that Luigi gets off on a heinous murder he committed and then he shows up at his own musical, his own satirical musical.
But there is a musical called The Assassins, isn't there?
Making a Mockery00:08:12
I don't know.
I'm not a huge musical theater enthusiast, but uh.
So there's a musical by Steven Sondheim called The Assassins.
It is a, you know, this is kind of a also uses satire.
I mean, Steven Sondheim is very, very famous musical theater guy.
And I'm trying to remember the cat.
So the characters in this are John Wilkes Booth, Charles Gateau, Leon Cholgosh, who shot McKinley, Giuseppe Zengara, John Hinkley, Lee Harvey Oswald.
So those are all, those are all cast members of, or you know, members of the, of the show in The Assassins.
And it's, you know, it's, it's all about them.
Pretty fun.
Well, in the book of Mormon Sondheim, very, very famous.
In the Book of Mormon, they have Genghis Khan, Hitler, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Johnny Cochran appear during a song set in hell.
They also have a general.
I can't remember his name.
Do you remember his name, Blake?
General, I can't say his name because this is merely a PG-13 show, not an R-rated one.
Breaking Inside Scoop from our friend Grant Stinchfield.
Trump will endorse Senator John Cornyn over Texas AG Ken Prince.
That's barely breaking.
I feel like that's a good idea.
And there's a video to the Save America Act.
So are we getting the Save Act?
Apparently.
That's a thought crime.
Is it worth having Cornyn in the Senate for six more years if you get the Save America Act?
So is the Save Act and the Save America?
Is that part of the scoop?
Yeah.
Is it?
I kind of wonder because.
Paxton's been promised a very big position within the Trump administration.
Cornyn's going to agree to pass the Save America app.
Does that mean we're getting rid of the filibuster?
It could mean that we're getting rid of Pam Bondi.
Oh, boy.
I mean, that'll be a fun confirmation fight, too.
Oh, there's so much exciting things that can happen.
Well, I would assume I don't think Bondi goes anywhere.
I mean, our chat is not enjoying this news, by the way.
Yeah, I'm just, listen, this is from Grant Stitchfield.
I'm not saying it's true.
I'm saying he's saying it's an inside scoop.
Wouldn't that mean that we have to end the filibuster then?
Because they're not going to be standing.
I don't know what it would mean.
Maybe they'd be willing to do it finally just for this.
I mean, it does strike me as the sort of thing they might promise them where they'll say, well, now he's on board, but we can't do it because this other senator.
Well, you'd have to get it.
Yeah, I mean, if they're smart, they would say, listen, we need McConnell on board.
We need Susan Collins on board.
We need Lisa.
Because I guarantee you, those senators want Cornyn to stick around.
They don't want another bulldog like Paxton.
Now, is it worth passing the Save Act?
I know a lot of, I mean, one of my thought crimes is I know a lot of people are very invested in it.
I don't know that that act is, if I was going to say if I needed one piece of legislation that I could repeal the filibuster pass, I don't know that it would be that one.
You know what mine would be?
Immigration reform?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I'd take the annual green cards down from 1.2 million to about 0.2, which is about net zero immigration.
And I'd change them all to like genius visas.
Yeah.
Genius visas and gold visas.
You know, it turns out this whole Trump thing where he's like, you have to have $5 million net worth and you get a gold visa or whatever.
You have to invest.
Turns out a lot of countries have that and they're very successful.
So I'm open-minded to that.
The problem with ours, though, is historically with the EB5 program, the investments always end up kind of being like scams.
Yeah.
So like the Chinese investors get their green cards and the jobs and projects never materialize.
No, you're totally right.
It would have to be actually stringently enforced.
But here's the benefit.
If you drop the number down of total green cards, then you'd actually be able to.
Well, Andrew, if we had real senators who actually showed up to work, we could get more than one thing done, too, if we passed the filibuster.
Yeah, well, if we didn't have a fake and gay senate, then it would be actually something we could do.
Yeah.
But none of them actually show up to work.
Yeah.
I mean, the whole thing, Blake has a great take on this, that the most positive upside of nuking the filibuster is that Congress would actually have to do work.
Yeah.
And it'll be tough because this is why.
I feel like you kind of want to have the Democrats break it because one, there'll be some.
We don't have the breaks, right?
Be some criticism of Utah.
This guy's a fool, too.
And like, there will be some backlash against the party that does it.
It'll take them time to do it.
We seem to constantly be oscillating back and forth.
You don't want to be breaking the filibuster to pass one bill only three months before likely losing the ability to pass.
Here's the deal: I've been told very affirmatively that really the way to do this will not impact the midterms.
If you want the Save Act passed, you got to include it in the reconciliation bill in September, and then it won't be, it will be ready for the presidential election 28, but it's not going to be ready before then.
The other thing they should include in this, I don't know if there's a way to do it in reconciliation, redo the damn census.
The thing is, box.
No, they can do it before the president has the power to call for it.
In theory.
The Commerce Department, yeah, could call for it, but then you need to fund it.
And the question is, how do you fund it?
I mean, listen, where there's a will, there's a way.
I believe that.
That's the way Democratic republics should work in theory.
I don't know.
They're just trying to derail us.
Well, also, the problem with letting the Democrats do it first is they're just going to call for amnesty.
Well, they're going to call for amnesty.
They're going to make Puerto Rico a state.
And then they're going to pack the Supreme Court.
So then, waiting to get back in power by letting them do it first doesn't really matter anyways, because they would have already.
Why don't we match their state-for-state thing and basically turn eastern Washington into a state?
Why don't we turn uh eastern Oregon into?
Well, you do to dismember states, to do dismember states, it cannot be done without the permission of that state.
So you'd have to be cutting pieces off a state that agrees to this.
All right.
Well then, break up uh Republican states into two.
I think at the point where we're creating new states by splitting states in half i'm just gonna say it we are at.
We are at the point of just national death spiral.
We're at we might as well just fight a civil war.
Yeah no I, I don't disagree.
Uh, I think, I think more likely, it'll be funny for them to start trying to make Puerto Rico a state and then they'll just confront, what a disaster, what a disaster piece Puerto Rico is as an entity.
Yeah, Puerto Rico.
Oh, we have that on stamp.
I guess we do.
I guess we have a floating pile of garbage.
That was the line.
What, the floating pile of garbage?
That was the line.
I guess.
What we could do, what we could disavow is, we could disavow, we could use that, we could get rid of the filibuster and we could impose independence on Puerto Rico.
Preempt them, preempt them.
Now he's thinking aside, we just give the presidency to some independent for our Caribbean operation.
So it makes sense.
We have a lot of naval um, a lot of naval infrastructure down there.
Well, we just have to lease that piece of land, like we do with Guantanamo Bay.
Here's the other part we could do and I saw this floated in an article.
Uh so, based on the history of how Dc was laid out, do you know that the original map was stretched much further into northern Virginia?
Yeah, so it used to be square.
Yeah, exactly.
So point is, you could capture back something like 600,000 or 500,000 northern Virginians and put them back in the District Of Columbia, apparently by presidential edict.
That's what they claim.
I know, I know, I know.
I'm just saying, if you're gonna, if you're, if you're preempting their preemption right, if you're getting ahead of this, you make Puerto Rico independent you, you permanently lease the the, the naval facility there.
Then you grant back the land in northern Virginia, so you make Virginia essentially a red state.
Then, by giving all the Dems back to DC and a couple, and then you do the immigration thing.
Those are the things you really didn't say that yeah it's it's, those would be.
Those would be preemptive measures to block their ability to really do.
It's tough, it would be interesting.
Just a side effect of creating a real congress is it would be hard to know exactly what would unfold, because people have gotten so used to voting with a congress that's fake.
Keep the Pressure On00:08:10
So you'd probably you'd probably in the end end up have getting more moderates in Congress, because people would get a little more spooked by the promises people make.
Because we're so large swings like you want to vote for people like these days, people are voting for these absolute fire breathers, in part because I think deep down they know that nothing is ever getting passed by this congress.
That's my gut feeling.
I don't know about that.
Maybe not though, like in, I guess.
To go the other way, in the, I guess I would say in the Uk they have a lot of squishes in parties and in in the Uk they do have total, absolute sovereignty.
Of parliament can pass whatever it wants at any time and there's definitely no filibuster, and you always have majority control, because that's what decides who is the prime minister yeah, and as a result, you seem to perpetually have a bunch of squishes in the House OF Commons.
Yeah interesting, and I think I think you see that in a lot of different ways.
I think the you might be right in the long term, but in the short run we've got this muscle memory built up for fire breathers and we want them.
I mean, this is the whole point of like it's dumb for Trump to back Corny when you have Paxton sitting there, who's proven he can win a statewide race by 10 points.
By the way, not saying he would repeat that maybe it'd be closer certainly, because that was a wavier a little bit, with Trump winning, but anyways well, and also, if I mean the grassroots is upset about yeah, the grassroots may not even show up, though also, in the process, this is what i'm worried about you take everything good off the board and you think you're going to energize the base, like you have another The thing coming.
Like, you have to give the grassroots its due.
You have to give them out.
Especially when the turnout was already going to be low.
So now you just pick him again.
I fully believe that.
I think there's been a lot of press.
I think the thing that turns turnout out is press.
Just people talking about it.
Talrico, the drama, like it's going to turn out people.
Yeah, but you got to figure that if the grassroots, keep in mind, Cornyn's a guy who was booed off of the stage at the NRA convention in Texas just a couple years ago.
So if the grassroots aren't fired up for this guy, just because he gets the endorsement, right, as powerful as it is, that doesn't mean you're going to get the same level of turnout.
And then this is a race we know where the Democrats are going to put a ton of money into.
We just know they're going to.
They're going to look at flipping a seat.
And I got interviewed by this New York Times reporter, real seasoned political reporter, because I was tweeting up a storm yesterday about Talrico.
And she kept, you could tell what she was really driving at.
She's like, do you think this poses a more serious danger to the Republican Party when you have an evangelical that kind of presents the way he does?
And my take on it is, you know, maybe in the context of Texas, he'll fool some like normie middle-of-the-road road people.
But like, if you're a real Christian, a real evangelical, like steeped in the culture of evangelicalism, the big mega churches in Texas, this guy makes your skin crawl.
Because it's like this fake religious skin suit that he's wearing, this golly g shucks, like God's non-binary.
And it's like, you know, trans abortions and pronouns on your business cars.
It's like, no, this guy, this guy will animate the base in a massive way.
So I actually think Talrico is so hateable that he's going to animate a big turnout.
But you're right.
Cornyn is not going to animate a big turnout.
I think Texas is different than a lot of states.
Like, Texas has its own identity.
Texas has its own gravitational pool, you know?
And I think Trump's endorsement is only going to carry so far.
It is very similar, though, to Warnock and the fake Christian act that they pulled there in 2020 or in the 2021 runoff there, too.
They got him to become a senator.
A lot of people stayed home after 2020 and it's with the and then independents either voted for him and fell for that or just didn't vote at all.
Yeah, well, interesting.
Mike Pompeo has also just endorsed John Cornyn, too.
Oh, of course.
The dominoes are falling.
Yeah.
All right.
Listen, politics is the art of the possible.
You don't get everything you want.
It's important to say that.
You know, we were looking at that one clip, Blake, where some caller called in.
Jack, you'll appreciate this.
It was an email we got.
You read it to Charlie.
And maybe I just saw it.
Maybe you didn't see this clip.
But the email said, I regret voting for President Trump.
This was, you know, 2025, early 2025.
And Charlie just immediately said, be careful when you say that.
We have the clip.
I think we do.
Let me see.
All right, if you have the clip.
And I, you know, it's moments like this where you got to remember that President Trump has been an absolute fighter for the grassroots.
He doesn't get everything right.
And it's moments like this that are fine.
491.
Yeah, 491.
We have 491.
Joe Spinella, $5.
I regret my vote.
Voted Trump 162024.
Let me just pause.
We're almost done.
Well, no, no, I want to pause.
Be careful with that statement.
Who is his name?
What's his name?
Joe.
Joe, because if all of a sudden the economy's booming in December and we're getting spending cuts and the border's secure and we're on Project 10 million, be careful just saying you regret it.
If this just might be one night you don't like, just be careful with such a statement like that.
That was pretty strong sell, Blake.
Yeah.
Had no hair upon my face.
Jack, you are an avatar for many in the MAGA movement.
Reflect on what Charlie said there.
Yeah, I get what Charlie's saying.
Charlie saying, let him cook.
Charlie saying, let the man cook.
Let the man that we entrusted with our vote, the man who rose up at Butler, Pennsylvania to his feet and roared like a lion, the man who we put all of our hopes and dreams into in 2024, let him cook.
All right.
Literally, just let him cook.
And you don't always know what the end game is going to be with President Trump because he operates from a level of strategic ambiguity.
He uses strategic ambiguity to his benefit.
I mean, you might go to sleep on Friday and wake up and find that we've arrested the president of Venezuela, right?
Without any question about that.
It was a little bit of a surprise.
It's just something where I think what Charlie's saying is, you know, wait until you see the results.
Wait until you see the results.
Here's where I go back.
I fall back on the fact that Democrats are simply unacceptable.
And so, yeah, we need to keep the fire on.
We need to keep the pressure on.
Senator Mark Wayne Mullen is a personal friend of mine, but he's now going to be in charge of DHS.
I will absolutely light him up with a billion texts if he starts, you know, getting soft.
And so you keep the pressure on.
But listen, here's, let me just preview what's going to happen here.
They're going to put negotiating pieces on the table at DHS to get Sanctuary Cities to fall in line.
The question is, what do you put on the table to get that done?
Anyways, I'm previewing where this is going to go, and everybody needs to brace for impact.
I will say you will get commas, not drama.
You know, that was the expression that one of our guests used on the show today.
If you get them to hand over the criminal illegals that are just arrested in normal due process, okay?
You will get massive results if you get that.
So are they going to try and trade amnesty for some?
Are they going to try and trade guest workers for some?
Are they going to say, hey, we'll leave the peaceful ones alone?
Are they going to say DACA recipients get citizenship?
Whatever that thing is that they're going to put on the offering block, it's going to be, it could be, you know, I don't know.
Just, I'm warning you.
But the point is, Democrats are simply unacceptable.
We got to keep the pressure on.
But like, the reason we're even talking about Somali fraud and $19 billion, the reason we're talking about 20 million illegals flooding the border, the reason we're talking about Catholics getting surveilled, the reason we're talking about J Sixers getting imprisoned, the reason we're talking about all these terrible things is because Democrats.
So they're simply unacceptable.
As frustrating as the process can be.
Hi, folks.
Andrew Colvett here.
Kids In Church Loud00:14:05
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All right.
Last topic.
If we want to keep going, I don't know if we have five months.
We could do kids in church.
Yeah, let's hit kids in church.
Already dive into it.
We're diving into it.
All right, so this is all, this was all sparked.
I believe we have the church in Washington.
Let's throw that up and let's post David French too.
Well, we need the initial prompting.
So this is a church in Washington and they publish their loud kids policy.
They have four options.
Which is at Mount Washington Church.
We are committed to transparency and accountability in all matters of church life.
The following document outlines our comprehensive procedures regarding loud children in worship.
Please consider this your official notice of policy clarification.
Effective immediately, if a family is considering visiting Mount Washington Church and they have a loud kid, the following options are available.
Option one, the family brings the kid.
Option two, the family makes sure that they bring the kid.
Option three, the family has to see that the kid is brought to church.
And option four, the kid is absolutely welcome and respected.
So this went viral, of course.
They say policy enacted, no exceptions.
They're saying bring your kids in.
It doesn't matter how much they scream or puke.
The final line was the best.
If your child makes noise, you are not bothering us.
You are blessing us.
So there were a variety of responses to that.
That was embraced by a man I feel like we don't hear as much from lately.
He's relegated to the children.
He was significantly.
He popped up a lot during the early Trump days, and he does still exist.
And that is David French.
And David French strongly endorsed that.
He thought that was a great policy for churches to have.
But there was also a competing.
response tweet from Matt Walsh, a guy a lot of us know.
And he said, I don't love it.
He says, I'm actually considerably less tolerant of loud kids in public now than I was before I had my own.
Your children should not be allowed to disrupt a church service or any other public gathering.
If they're being unruly, remove them.
If they're old enough to know better, take them out and discipline them.
And if they're too young to control themselves, then again, remove them.
I've had to do this many times in many situations.
It blows my mind when parents just let them just sit there and let their kids totally disrupt and irritate an entire room full of strangers.
I don't have any kids, but how do you guys feel about this, Jack and Andrew?
Jack's the Catholic guy.
Go first.
Well, I'll go.
Yeah.
So, I mean, we look, when your kids are little, that's a time where, you know, like babies and toddlers, each kid, you know, kind of grows out of it at a certain time.
They're going to go through that crying stage.
And yeah, there are times if the kid's just wailing.
You go in the back.
You just, you take them in the back, you hang out there till they've calmed down, and then you bring them back.
You want them to experience as much as possible.
So one thing that we do at church that we've done since we've had kids is that we sit in the very front row or at least as close to the front row as possible so they can see everything that's going on.
And we tend to choose churches that have much more going on in terms of what you see, not just stained glass windows, but artwork and more traditional services than sort of like the YMCA with a cross kind of churches, if you know what I mean.
And so we want them to be able to see all of that.
But at the same time, if your kid's being loud, if your kid's being unruly, then they need to be disciplined.
There's no question.
And I use a variety of incentives and punishments, right?
So, you know, it's the carrot and stick method.
But the incentives are, hey, you know, usually what I'll tell the kids is, all right, guys, if you're good in church today, we're going to Wawa.
But then if they're not good, I'll sit there and go, is that Wawa behavior?
Is that Wawa behavior?
And then they'll kind of realize if not.
And if they're really bad, guess what?
We don't go to Wawa.
And if they're worse, they go in the back and they get time out.
There's no question.
So you have to discipline.
So I think there's a, you know, look, I don't want to ever come down on a parent that's, you know, that's got a kid that's not listening.
But at the same time, you do have to have like actual, you know, just basic social understanding and social graces when you're out in public, not just in church.
Yeah, I sounded off on this and it got like quoted in a few places.
I was surprised.
You know, it was just like, listen, I'm a father of three.
My kids are crazy.
They're really good kids, pretty well behaved when we give them, like when we prep them, but they're loud.
Like we have energetic kids.
I actually think, Jack, your kids, from what I've gathered, are better behaved in public than mine.
So like there's zero judgment here coming from me.
But the thing is, there is a big difference between, you know, fostering a reasonable tolerance for families and that kids are going to cry and they're going to be loud sometimes versus just embracing and endorsing absolute chaos and disruption.
Mixed places.
We're talking restaurants, movie theaters, churches.
Kids should absolutely be on their best behavior.
And I totally agree with Walsh.
If they're not, you remove them.
And by the way, we have a whole deal with our kids.
It's like, if you guys don't shape up, you get a warning, we'll just leave.
And yeah, it's embarrassing for the whole family.
We'll leave.
We'll say, sorry, I got to go.
Our kids are monsters right now.
And we got to leave.
So I think, and by the way, once you do that once or twice, the kids figure it out and they stop acting up.
And as soon as you give them that warning, they'll usually simmer down.
And this is the other thing.
I'm all about having like context for kids to participate in church life and in the mix, not just in kids' church or childcare or whatever.
But it's like, you know, they have to be respectful.
And then if they don't prove that they can be respectful, again, you remove them.
So yeah, I think this is just like, this feels like a woke liberal church that French would go to.
I don't know if it is a woke liberal church or not.
I don't know.
I think you would commonly see this in, I think it's a way of saying like, oh, we're pro-family.
We're pro.
It's kind of aligns with pro-life stuff to be like super pro-baby in all contexts.
I think it's probably a misguided impulse overall.
That's what I'm saying.
I don't think it's a big deal either way.
I think one thing that is interesting is there's probably an aspect of maybe low church versus high church there or something.
Yeah.
Like there should generally be a degree of solemnity to a lot of religious services.
And if you're just letting a kid scream, it does disrupt solemnity.
There should be an element of the sacred.
This is what I think.
If you don't care about young kids disrupting your church service, you don't have a high regard for what your pastor's preaching or the word of God or the homily or whatever.
Yeah, that's what I would say.
put it another way it's for example would you want a kid screaming as loud as possible during a wedding during a funeral during your favorite movie and for a lot of parishes you should review you should view a weekly religious service i mean certainly if you're a catholic at a mass and orthodox at a mass uh you should see that as similarly sacred actually to a funeral or a wedding i agree jack you were about to chime in No, of course.
I was just going to say, you know, when you talk about in when you go to Latin Mass, it's, I mean, you see so many kids there because there's so many young couples these days.
And, you know, kids are all over the place.
However, when church starts, they stay in the back if they're, you know, below a certain age.
If they're below the age of being able to control themselves, then they hang out in back with mom.
And there's, you know, it's just totally.
It's totally magical.
It's common sense.
Foz says, should be more sacred than a movie theater.
That's my point.
Most of these people that wrote this letter would get more upset if these young kids were allowed during their trip to the movies and a date night than they would if they interrupted their church service.
Yeah, probably.
Blake.
I don't know.
I don't have any kids.
I don't have a super strong investment in this.
Blake is really loud during movies, though.
I remember whenever I'm in town and there's a new Tyler Perry out, Blake is always demanding that we go see it, especially the Medea series.
He's never missed a single one opening night, by the way.
And he's just constantly screaming.
Jack, you know that's not true because you know I make sure to never travel when there's a new Madea movie coming out.
That's what I'm saying.
I'm in town when I'm in town.
I would never let you, I would never, I wouldn't want to be hosting you when I could be going to a Medea movie.
Don't go in there.
Don't go in.
Don't open that door.
Blake, you're really excited for Scary Movie Six, too, right?
Scary movies.
They're up to six of them.
I can't believe those are still going.
I'm completely.
We have something scary loaded, though.
Wait, wait, scary movies.
We have something terrifying.
I think this, here's the poster for Scary Movie Six.
The Strong Cell is fully kicked in.
Strongcell.com.
90-day risk-free money-back guarantee.
You too could have Blake or his hair as good as Blake.
Oh, my goodness.
Yeah.
It's funny if you throw back to that clip of you and Charlie and how like just everything was shaved.
Blake, you look like a newborn in that cliff.
That's why I'm not allowed to scream in church.
It's like the Gerber baby.
Was that screaming in church?
Blake is.
AI could make this happen.
You guys are weird.
Well, that was fun.
Blake.
There's some really good things coming out the other day.
It was like a baby stand-up comic.
And it was hilarious.
He's like, so what's the deal with breastfeeding, huh?
My food comes from my mom.
It's crazy.
All right.
Before we go here, Jack, we have to.
I'm just waiting.
Are we sure?
It's typing.
I'm going to say something.
I just want to make it personal information.
Hold on, stand by.
Oh, wait, one.
Waiting.
Never mind.
I'll do the second part of this.
Don't forget daylight savings.
It's happening.
I want to forget it.
Yes.
Yeah, us not changing.
Luckily, we get to forget it.
We don't have to change it.
Yeah, but we just don't have to change the time we come to our show.
Our show is an hour earlier.
Yeah.
Which stinks, by the way.
I know.
It's super lame.
An hour earlier does kind of stink for us.
So for the record, we should have an understanding.
Wait, wait, wait.
You have to explain this.
For people who don't understand that outside of you guys, you guys get affected by daylight savings way more than everybody else because in a way your time doesn't change, but your relationship to the rest of the country changes because Arizona doesn't have daylight savings.
We also don't get as much light at night.
It's terrible.
Oh, who cares?
Okay, hold on.
Go back to the Blake Pro 650.
So Caboose just goes, Blake looks like he's about to kneel for the national anthem.
It's so true.
Colin Kaepernick.
I think you have the same picnic as him, by the way.
I think my friend may have literally just done a Colin Kaepernick me mashup there.
Is that what that is?
That might literally do that.
All right, fine.
You have the exact same skin picnic.
All right.
And we have a big family business announcement.
Our boy Russ, who works on Human Events and also on this show.
So it's one of Jack's producers.
Has gotten engaged.
Let's go.
Let's go.
Congratulations to Russ.
You are joining the club of the.
Well, almost joining the club.
Danny's next.
Hopefully, maybe.
And then Blake.
Yeah, we'll see.
Send your emails, freedom at charliekirk.com.
If you are.
There it is.
Congratulations to our guy, Russ.
This has been, he's been planning this.
He was going to come into work today, and I was like, no, you can't.
And, you know, anyways.
So that's Russ, one of Jack's producers.
He also just became a homeowner.
I believe in the last.
Let's go.
Checking off the boxes.
He's living the American dream.
Total, total life upgrade for him.
House is swank, by the way.
He's got to see some of the pictures.
Haven't gone and visited myself, but Russ is a great guy.
And, you know, I said, just make sure she's not a spy, bro.
Just make sure she's not a spy because, you know, that's what always happens around us.
What can I say?
Oh, man.
Hopefully, she's been properly vetted.
So, well, there you go.
That's it.
What a good note to end on.
You know?
Crying babies.
Russ is going to have some soon.
Church.
And Strong Cell is working to great effect.
All right.
Jack, you want to take us out?
Ladies and gentlemen, as always, go out there and commit more thought crime.