Charlie Kirk and Senator John Kennedy analyze President Trump's limited military mission in Iran, which aims to destroy 75% of missile infrastructure while avoiding regime change. They discuss DHS spending of $220 million on political ads and the Freedom Trainers group allegedly undermining jury systems. Secretary Chris Wright explains oil price volatility near $84 per barrel due to Strait of Hormuz threats, noting strategic reserves stabilize markets. Historian Dr. Paul Ray contextualizes Iran's resilience since the Pahlavi dynasty's secular reforms and predicts a potential counter-revolution, framing these actions as essential for long-term American energy security. [Automatically generated summary]
I run the largest pro-American student organization in the country fighting for the future of our republic.
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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.
All right, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
It is March 10th, 2026.
Welcome, Blake.
Howdy.
It's that time again.
Lots to get to.
We got a jam-packed show for you.
Senator John Kennedy is going to be joining us.
And then we've got a crazy story about leftists training juries to let the criminals off the hook.
The Unpredictable Victory in Toronto00:07:49
Yeah, it's bad.
It's real bad.
So we want to make sure we get to that.
Then we've got Secretary of Energy Chris Wright joining us.
Lots of news about the Strait of Hormuz, oil prices.
We're going to get into it, actually, with Senator Kennedy as well.
He comes from Oil State, Louisiana.
And then we have Professor Ray from Hillsdale College going to give us a whole history of Iran and that region, what this conflict really means for that.
So lots of educating today, lots of explaining what's actually going on behind the headlines.
Because listen, there's a lot of short-term push and pull you're going to feel.
There's a lot of Twitter chatter.
There's going to be a lot of social media chatter.
There's going to be a lot of headlines.
What's really going on?
And there are some long-term impacts that are going to be felt.
I mean, I kind of liken this to, you know, we live in historic times, Blake, where you could make the argument that Reagan in the 80s gave rise to Clinton's booming economy in the 90s, right?
And so we are in that kind of an era where President Trump is doing a lot of hard things.
You don't have to agree with everything.
I'm not asking you to beat the drums of war.
I certainly am not.
But when you think about the foundations in the Middle East, from an energy security standpoint, from a geopolitical standpoint, we are living in historic times, and we have to understand where these pieces will lead, where they are going to take us in the years ahead.
So we're going to educate us, all of you, ourselves as well.
But first, we've got to get to what happened.
There was another shooting at an American consulate this time in Toronto.
Let's get the press clipping.
We're going to explain what's really going on here.
Clip 8.
At this stage, I can confirm that the RCMP is working closely with the Toronto Police Service and our international partners who will assist us in a fulsome investigation into the shooting that took place overnight early this morning at the American consulate behind us.
At this time, the INSET team has been engaged as this is a national security incident.
And we are working with Toronto Police and others to understand the motivations of those involved.
The Canadian Mountains like slamming the table.
Like, what could the motive be?
So, yeah, so this is what's so funny about Canada, right?
They won't say that it was a Muslim guy who's upset about the Iran conflict.
So he went and shot up a U.S. consulate in Toronto.
They're going to have this guy locked in a room, and he'll be like, I did it for Islam.
And they'll punch him in the face.
Stop speaking in Riddles.
Yeah, what is your motive?
We all know what this is.
Obviously, over the weekend, we saw those two young men that were inspired by ISIS propaganda to go throw IEDs at a bunch of protesters in New York.
And now we have a shooting at a U.S. consulate.
There was obviously the Austin bar nightclub shooting where a number of people were shot, few were killed.
We know what the motivation is.
So this is essentially the bargain that your leaders have made with you in the West.
They've said, don't be racist.
You've got to import the third world or you're racist and you're going to like it.
Invade you, you know, your communities.
Invade me harder, daddy.
That's the bargain.
Now, what did you get out of that?
You got approximately nothing, except now every time the Muslim community feels offended, you have to watch fellow Americans get shot up and bombs thrown at them.
So congratulations, Western man.
This is the world that you've created.
And for no particular reason.
But this is the sad truth of this new reality that we live in.
We have a bunch of Muslims all over the country now, all over the West, including Canada, England, France, Germany.
And when they get offended, they might drive their car into your parade or your Christmas festival.
They might shoot up your consulate or throw IEDs at you when you're protesting on the street.
Or they might just be your mayor in New York.
So that's the breaking news.
It's not good news, but it's unfortunately the reality that we live in.
Now, there is another angle that is also happening, and we're going to get into this with Senator Kennedy when he joins.
But President Trump told some reporters last night that the military mission is nearly complete.
Now, the markets loved this.
The Dow Jones was down all day yesterday, went shooting back up, ended the day up almost 240 points.
Oil, which had spiked almost as high as $115, $120 a barrel, is down around $90 now.
So the war is very nearly complete, is the interesting way that he put this.
So let's make sure.
He said it's very complete, but also just beginning, which I think.
And then a reporter asked him about it, and he said, in the way only Trump can.
It could be both.
Yeah, well.
It could be both.
We're very complete so far, and we're just beginning how complete are we?
In the words of Charlie, the unpredictability is the point.
But it's interesting to see the markets react to this.
Let's see here.
Cut seven.
On Iran, you called it an excursion.
You said it would be over soon.
Are you thinking this week it will be over?
Are you talking about days?
I think so.
Okay, and with respect to.
Very soon.
Look, everything they have is gone, including their leadership.
In fact, there are two levels of leadership, and even actually, as it turns out, more than that, but two levels of leadership are gone.
Most people have never even heard about the leaders that they're talking about.
So it's obviously been very, very powerful, very effective.
So, yeah, to Blake's point, I think, you know, we had Robert Barnes on yesterday, and he was basically suggesting the president could declare victory at any point he wanted at this time and use that as an off-ramp.
It seems he could possibly even declare victory while still waging the conflict.
I actually think there is a strategic brilliance to this, though, actually.
I think the president understands that the Navy has been essentially degraded to the point that it's going to take them years, if not decades, to recreate.
The military infrastructure, I think they've got about 20% of the rocket launchers, missile launchers remaining.
I'm assuming those are going to be some of the cleanup work that's going on right now.
The real question, though, is at what point, from a regime standpoint, is victory real?
You know, you got to understand.
The regime tried to assassinate President Trump a couple of times at least.
And by the way, the new leader, the son of Khomeini or whatever, his wife was killed.
His son was killed.
His aunt was killed.
His dad was killed.
No one has seen him yet.
He might be a figurehead.
The president said it's not going to be a long, drawn-out conflict.
We have to hope that's true.
I think it will be politically harmful if it is not true.
So we want to have this end quickly.
I think everyone wants it to end quickly.
But the question is, how much will they be able to achieve before they can just say, all right, we're done and go home?
But a thing that is inevitably true is it's a lot easier to start a conflict than to end it.
And to some extent, as you said, all the new Supreme Leaders' family members got killed.
What if he doesn't want it to end?
What if he says, I'm going to send suicide bombers everywhere that we can?
I wonder there's a larger question about what it's going to take to get the population to take back their country, or do we even want that?
Do we even care?
And it seems that in recent days, last two days specifically, the admin has been signaling that that's not as huge of a concern as maybe we anticipated at the beginning.
Remember, they've lost about 50 of their sort of political leaders, their top brass.
So it'll be interesting to see.
Howdy, Blake here.
America Not The World's Policeman00:14:50
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The brain is an amazing organ.
It starts working in a mother's womb and it doesn't stop working until you get elected to Congress.
Now, to answer your question: Even duct tape can't fix stupid.
This country was founded by geniuses, but it's being run by a bunch of idiots.
Anybody who votes for any of these bills without seeing the fine print is like a rock, only dumber.
Putting the vice president in charge of solving this problem, I don't know, it's like making El Chapo the drug czar.
God created the world, but everything else is made in China.
If the aliens landed tomorrow and said, take me to your leader, it would be embarrassing.
All right, we have Senator John Kennedy on.
His first time on the show, so we wanted to make it special and do a brief montage of some of his greatest hits.
Senator, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
It's an honor to have you.
I hope you didn't mind our celebration of some of your quips and whimsies.
We love them here, and so does the country.
Welcome to the show.
Well, thank you.
I would deny everything, guys, but you have the video.
Yeah, there's no reliability here.
Thanks for having me, Andrew.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's an honor to have you here, sir.
You know, there's so much to talk about.
You are the senator of an oil state, a state that's a lot of its economy revolves around refineries and shipping, and there's a lot of news right now.
So I wanted to get into that as a first step, and then we'll get into some of the DHS stuff.
What's going on in Iran?
How are you feeling about it?
How is Louisiana feeling about it?
And give us your perspective.
I don't want America to be the world's policeman.
But on occasion, we have to intervene because one of the bad guys is trying to be the world's policeman.
Here's what our intelligence showed: you would think after the curb stomping that America and Israel gave Iran back in June, that they would have learned their lesson.
They didn't.
Our intelligence showed that Iran had restarted its nuclear weapons program.
It was producing between 200 and 600 missiles a month.
Its goal was to stockpile so many drones and so many ballistic and cruise missiles that it could threaten to destroy the entire Middle East if anybody interfered with their renewed efforts to get a nuclear weapon.
That's not a world that's safe for America.
The president, in my opinion, did not start a war.
He's trying to prevent a war.
It will be a limited excursion.
So far, we've destroyed 75% of their missile launchers.
We're destroying their missile manufacturing facilities, their drone manufacturing facilities, their new efforts to get a nuclear warhead.
We're destroying all of the infrastructure for the Revolutionary Guard.
I think that will be complete, gentlemen, in the next few weeks.
And then I expect the president to withdraw.
I do not believe he will send troops.
If he sends troops, the thud you hear will be me face planning from surprise.
Please don't do that.
But I think that's a really good assessment.
And I think that, you know, when the conflict started, I felt that it had not been sold properly to the American public.
I trust the president and his instincts, and we have his back, but I did not feel that it had been sold properly.
I do feel that comments from Secretary Rubio, from JD Vance, from Secretary Hegseth have completed the picture.
And I think you've done a beautiful job there, Senator.
The question.
And Druk, if I could say this, I think you're dead on there.
Look, we both know the president.
As long as I've known him, one of his character traits is that he grows anxious when he has an unexpressed thought.
He has no filter.
And sometimes that prevents him from articulating a message that is as tight or coherent as we would like.
Rubio is there to help.
Hedgeeth is there to help.
And what I just told you is what we have been told by the administration in classified and unclassified briefings.
Yeah, I think you are a great messenger.
It's one of your hallmarks.
And I think you've done a very good job of that right now.
Now, the question, though, is there's also a political calculus.
And one of the things that I've been aware of is that this could be the absolute spot-on right decision from a national security perspective, but it could have political ramifications.
I can tell you, Senator, that the Gen Zers that we're talking to on campus, our students, they're telling us that young people, they don't want this conflict.
Even those that voted for President Trump do not want this conflict.
What would your message be to Gen Zers watching and listening that are skeptical of any war?
Well, look, those are fair questions that are being asked.
People remember well Afghanistan.
People remember well Libya.
People remember well Iraq.
Those are very fair questions.
What I would tell them is the truth.
What I just said, I'm not going to repeat it.
This is a limited intervention.
It's not something we wanted.
We negotiated with the late Ayatollah, who's now as dead as Woodrow Wilson.
And I don't won't shed a tear for him.
We negotiated with him for weeks.
He said no to everything except lunch.
And it became clear that we were going to get nowhere.
I would like to see the president.
He hasn't asked me for advice.
So, you know, I'm going to offer it anyway.
I would like to see the president address the nation and say, here's why I went in, and here's when I'm coming out.
Here's what we've accomplished.
Here's my objective.
Senator, so we've been told, We played the clip before you joined that, you know, this could be nearly complete and that it's going to be short.
So now we're hearing the messaging kind of pivot.
There's a little bit of a pivot in the messaging.
What does success look like in this conflict if Khomeini's son is still the new supreme leader?
Well, here's what success looks like to me, and I don't speak for him, but I think President Trump would agree.
Success to me is Iran or the political theological leadership in Iran having four wheels down and their axle dragging.
Drone manufacturing facilities gone.
Missile manufacturing facilities gone.
New steps to obtain a nuclear warhead gone.
Iranian Navy gone.
Iranian Air Force gone.
As much infrastructure as we can find for the Revolutionary Guard gone.
And then the good people, and they are good people, of Iran who don't want these knobheads running their country any more than anybody else in the world does, will have an opportunity, perhaps, maybe, to choose their own government.
Success to me looks like a few more weeks.
I don't want to leave too soon just because of my Democratic colleagues are screaming like they're part of a prison riot.
They're not going to support anything that President Trump does.
But that's what success looks like to me.
I guess a rational concern a lot of people have is if we if we even if we do all that destruction if we come out and the regime is still in place and still Despises us.
Would we be able to go back?
I guess I would just be worried.
Is this just a bigger version of what happened last summer where we go in and we break a lot of stuff, but the fundamental problem is still there and might even hate us a lot more?
Well, I supported what we did last summer, and I support what we're doing now.
I'm not going to repeat everything I just said.
The question I think most fair-minded people have to ask themselves is: Is the world better off after we leave Iran this time, having done what I just said we were going to do, and we're doing it.
We're almost done.
Is the world better off?
And I think the answer, and are the Iranian people better off?
Have we completely solved the problem?
No, it's going to take regime change, but the people of Iran are going to have to determine that they want regime change.
Look, the new supreme leader, just like the old supreme leader, they believe that their God tells them to kill everybody who doesn't agree with them.
Not just Americans, not just Israelis, even their fellow Muslims.
I don't think any fair-minded person believes that they are not trying to obtain a nuclear weapon.
I don't think any fair-minded person believes that if they obtain a nuclear warhead and the missile technology to deliver it, they will use it.
And once they get it, I don't think any fair-minded person believes that that will not lead to nuclear proliferation.
Every country in the Middle East will obtain a nuclear weapon, so will Japan, so will South Korea, so will Australia, and then it's off to the races.
We have a chance to stop it.
Does it necessarily mean regime change?
I don't know, guys.
I hope so, but I can't predict the future.
I have to wait for it like everybody else.
Let me say it again: I don't want America to be the world's policeman, but there are times that we have to intervene to keep the bad guys from being the world's policemen, and this is one of those times.
Yeah, and I.
And let me just say, I talked about this in my book.
I don't know why this is, guys, but there's some people in this world, they're not mixed up, they're not confused, they're not sick.
It's not that their mama and daddy didn't love them enough, they're just bad people.
If I make it to heaven, I'm going to ask God why.
Some of them run countries, and if you weakness around them invites the wolves every single time, you have to be careful.
We don't want another war in the Middle East, but this limited excursion is necessary.
I think that's so well said.
And the title of your book is just too good.
I have to mention it, How to Test Negative for Stupid and Why Washington Never Will.
And by Senator John Kennedy.
Everybody check it out.
Senator, you did the country a great service, and I'll explain why I think that in just a second.
But you had a questioning, a line of questioning that led to a series of events at DHS.
And I'm going to play that clip for everybody, cut three.
You're testifying that President Trump approved this ahead of time.
So I'm understanding.
We had conversations about making sure that we were telling people I'm asking you, sorry to interrupt, but the president approved ahead of time you spending $220 million running TV ads across the country in which you are featured prominently.
Yes, sir.
We went through the legal processes, did it correctly?
Yes.
He did.
Trump's $220 Million Ad Approval00:15:47
Yes.
Okay.
And one thing, Senator, I think would be helpful to know is how effective that communications has been.
Senator, obviously that interaction led to your colleague, Senator Mark Wayne Mullen, being announced as the new DHS secretary.
So I have a question.
What do you have against Senator Mullen?
Why did you put him up to this?
I was voicing him into the bureaucracy.
Yeah, he must have been a good job.
He had a good job.
Look, I hate to lose him.
Look, I accept full responsibility for that.
That was me.
Nobody put me up to it.
Nobody asked me to do it.
Nobody approved my questions.
That was me.
I have a lot of gratitude to the former secretary and her department for securing the southern border.
Actually, it was President Trump who secured the southern border.
She and her team implemented his policies.
But there are management problems at the Department of Homeland Security.
I only got to talk about two of them in the limited time I had, but there are others.
And they are distracting and were distracting from President Trump's agenda and our agenda to make this country better.
Number two, a quarter of a billion, not a million, quarter of a billion dollars to run ads in which the secretary starred.
To me, they look like political ads, quarter of a billion dollars.
And apparently they weren't bid out, and they allegedly went to friends of hers.
I consider that spending porn.
The president didn't approve it.
I'm going to call out spending porn every single time.
Doesn't matter who does it.
And you can write that down and take it home to mama.
And if somebody gets upset about that, they need to fill out a hurt feelings report because I'm going to keep doing it.
And that's all that there was to it.
It wasn't some deep, dark agenda.
It was my doing.
Some liked it.
Some didn't.
But I will tell you this.
I've seen President Trump mad before.
But this time, as I said the other day, he was mad as a murder hornet.
Yeah.
Well, interesting background that you were probably not aware of.
We spent the whole day before the announcement was made that there was going to be a change of leadership calling this out.
And why it was so important was because the Democrats have known about this stuff and they were waiting to pounce.
And if they get power after the midterms, God forbid, they were going to use this against the president.
And so you did the nation a service.
And I'll prove it to you.
Here's Jamie Raskin in the House, cut one.
An investigation into the hundreds of millions of dollars that Secretary Noam channeled to various political friends and intimates of hers so that that money can be reclaimed for the American people.
Hundreds of millions of dollars might be a joke to somebody in the Trump cabinet, but it's not a joke to the American people.
And I've been hearing rumors, Senator, that they were going to use these for impeachment, maybe impeachment of Noam, maybe impeachment of President Trump.
So you getting ahead of this did a great service to the country.
And I genuinely thank you for it.
And it's no disrespect for some of the achievements, but yeah, we'd have been hearing rumblings ourselves.
And so I think you did a really great thing and it showed a lot of courage.
So the question is, you had a hearing this morning where somebody was saying that the judges, the judicial activists that are fighting ICE and deportations are braver than our ICE agents.
And you said that that guy triggered your gag reflex.
I thought it was another brilliant line.
Tell us what success looks like at DHS deportations.
It's one of the central planks of the president's agenda.
Legal immigration is legal.
Illegal immigration is illegal.
Duh.
Our immigration laws are not some second-tier statutes that people can violate without consequence.
We need to enforce our immigration laws.
Number two, how you enforce them matters.
They have to be enforced in accordance with due process, with equal protection, in accordance with the standards set forth for reasonable suspicion in the Supreme Court case of Terry v. Ohio.
If you want to protest them, you have every right as an American.
You do not have the right to protest violently.
Violence undermines the morality of what you say your movement stands for.
Gandhi knew that.
Dr. King knew that.
Mandelan knew that.
Protesting violently is also exquisitely stupid.
You're going to get hurt.
Most cops that I know, the vast majority, will leave you alone unless you do illegal stuff.
And then if you do illegal stuff, they're going to enforce the law.
That also seems to me to be a matter of common sense.
I think Mark Wayne will bring some common sense back.
I think Mark Wayne trusts Tom Holand, who I think has done an admirable job.
I think he will be firm.
I think he will be fair.
And I think he will be confirmed by the United States Senate.
I think the president has chosen him well.
He's tough as a pine knot.
And I hope he gets confirmed quickly.
Senator, one last question for you.
And I know you got to run here.
There is some rumors of what, if any, sort of deals could be made with these blue jurisdictions, the sanctuary cities and sanctuary states, to get them to cooperate.
Some people have mentioned that we might have to offer up a pathway for DACA recipients or something, right?
These are things that are going to grade against the base, the people in this audience.
Do you feel like some sort of deal needs to be made in that way, or is that what they're going to demand?
How can we get the Democrats to even fund DHS?
There's a lot of questions here, but is there anything that you'd be willing?
I know you're not the secretary, but is there anything that you'd be willing to offer up in exchange for getting them to cooperate with ICE detainers?
I don't think there's anything we can offer up.
I wouldn't support offering them up anything.
Most of these people believe in open borders.
They believe in, they are also the ones who told us to defund the police.
We've seen that vampire movie.
We know how it turns out.
They also now want to defund ICE.
That's ultimately what this is all about.
You can't reason with people like that.
If I were king for a day, I'm not, don't aspire to be.
I would use every legal mechanism I could to withhold their money because what they're doing, refusing to enforce federal law, not changing it, they think they're smarter and more virtuous than the American people and can pick and choose among which of our laws they think are just or unjust.
I would withhold their money.
Many of these people think America was wicked when it was founded and it's more wicked today.
I don't know, not all of them, but many of them do.
They're king of the hill, top of the list, crazy.
I'm sorry.
But that's the way it is.
And I don't think anything we offer them will get them to change their minds.
It's not all my Democratic friends, but there's some of them.
Others are just scared, guys.
The Karen wing of the Democratic Party wants to defund ICE.
And the Karen wing of the Democratic Party has told all the elected officials who happen to be Democrats that if they don't do their best to defund ICE, they, the Karen wing, will punish them the rest of their natural lives.
And they're scared.
I think you're right.
The radical left-wing fringe of the Democrat Party or the progressive coalition controls the party.
And sometimes I wonder about our own side, Senator.
You know, we're talking about the Everybody Wants to Save America Act pact passed, and it seems like we can't make any progress on it.
And this audience is frustrated by that.
I'm frustrated.
Well, I think you'll see some progress soon.
I support the SAVE Act.
I'm a co-sponsor.
Here's what I think we ought to do.
I think I'm in the minority.
The short way home here is reconciliation.
If we do it through reconciliation, we only need 51 votes.
Some of my colleagues say, Kennedy, you know, that's crazy.
It'll never pass muster under the Budget Controlled Act, which is one of the parameters on your ability to do something through reconciliation.
Here's what I say.
Look, I've seen things pass muster under reconciliation and what we call the birdbath that I never thought had a chance.
And I've seen other things that I thought were slammed dunk get turned down.
If I were king for a day, I'm not, but I would go hire the best legal minds I could find for us to craft a provision around the SAVE Act that would pass muster under the Budget Control Act and would survive a birdbath.
And I would take our shot.
And I don't know why we haven't done that.
We could have done it weeks ago.
I'm not criticizing anybody, but that's just the way I would do it.
Senator John Kennedy, thank you so much, sir.
And again, your book, I want to make sure I get the title because it is a good title.
How to test negative for stupid and why Washington Never Will.
God bless you again, sir, for your questioning, your honest questioning.
I think you did the nation a tremendous service, and thank you for articulating the vision I think that you have that the president shares in Iran.
I think it's the right one.
So, God bless you.
You guys are good, man.
I listen to you all the time.
Thank you.
Thank you, sir.
God bless you.
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Well, as I'm sure a lot of you already know and remember, today is six months since what happened to Charlie.
And one of the concerns we all have is making sure that the man who killed him is convicted.
And one thing we're all becoming much more aware of is the potential for our jury system to be a weak point in making sure that criminals are held to account for what they do.
And so there was a piece yesterday in the Washington Free Beacon.
They do a lot of great work about this fact that there is a left-wing group training activists on how to undermine the jury system.
And so we have the reporter who wrote that piece, Thomas Kadanaci.
Are you there, Thomas?
I'm here.
Hey, welcome to the program.
So this group, Freedom Trainers, why don't you just tell us what they're doing, what they're telling people, and what the ramifications of this would be.
Absolutely.
Well, I really appreciate you having me on, first of all, to talk about this because I think it's such an important issue, and it's certainly something that's going under the radar.
So, also, just at the forefront, I want to say this is something that I had to do multiple double takes on because I couldn't believe what I was coming across when I was researching this.
Essentially, there's a group based in DC that it's focused on DC right now, but it could clearly be something that spreads across the country.
And perhaps it has.
But what we see is they're working in DC to undermine Trump DOJ prosecutions that are taking place in the DC attorney's office.
And so, what the group does is essentially educate members of the jury or themselves try to infiltrate juries.
And when on there, they vote, quote, in favor of their conscience, not in favor of the law.
And obviously, this has a number of ramifications.
One thing I just want to say also off the start is: you know, the DOJ itself is not really an agency that often comments on things like this.
But I thought it was very telling that after we reached out, they did want to comment and they gave a pretty forceful response to our reporting here saying that they're aware and that they're, you know, anyone who engages in this type of activism should be held accountable.
Is there a way to hold them accountable?
Because I suppose what seems like a vulnerability here is, as they point out, it basically is legal to do this, to decide, you get on a jury and just decide, I'm not going to convict for any reason whatsoever.
Now, as your piece points out, judges and lawyers will attempt to remove such people, but all their training materials here are basically how to sneak onto a jury so that you can rig the verdict, correct?
Exactly.
And so, one thing I will note is in their training materials and in their webinars, which I attended, they say that there are sort of unambiguously legal maneuvers that you can take, such as, you know, quote, educating the public in the way that they're doing, handing out flyers near courthouses.
That appears to be one of the main things they do.
They camp outside of courthouses during jury selection and try to give pamphlets to prospective jurors.
And those pamphlets, which I also obtained, will have all sorts of different legal rationales to try to help jurors vote again their conscience.
Legal But Risky Jury Nullification00:10:34
But in addition to the unambiguously legal that they say, there are the quote legal but risky.
This is where the DOJ could potentially step in.
The legal but risky are things like discussing this process with jurors before deliberations begin.
This is something that's almost certainly happening, but again, no one's been caught doing this, or publicly stating that you intend to nullify.
That's something that they, again, they say is legal but risky.
I highly doubt that people who want to thwart a DOJ prosecution are going to just come out and openly say it.
But it's that first point discussing nullification with jurors, especially in the process of giving out one of these pamphlets and, you know, quote, educating that could be a potential hurdle for them in the future.
You know what this reminds me of?
It's like, you know, those jurists on the jurors rather on the OJ Simpson trial that were just like, some of them admitted afterwards that they knew he was guilty, but they just were, it was a get back for Rodney King.
And it's, there's a lot of other cases.
If, you know, every prosecutor in a big city has seen it happen where they'll have this.
And it's a vulnerability because you need, you know, the Supreme Court actually confirmed in a case recently, you need unanimity of 12 jurors to convict in a criminal case.
And you only need one holdout of those 12 to have a hung jury.
And it's difficult to bring a trial.
It's time consuming to do a trial.
You have to start over if there is a hung jury.
And that's what they're telling people in these materials.
If you, you only need to be that one holdout and you can just say, I'm not going to convict.
I'm not convinced.
I'm voting not guilty.
And you can blow up the whole case.
And we're seeing this over and over with the grand juries.
They're not indicting cases the federal government's bringing, but you only need one of these people in the Louis G. Mangioni case.
You might only need one of these people in the Tyler Robinson case.
And it's scary because it's giving people the opportunity.
People who might have been activists before, it's giving them that sort of like quote unquote legal backing to go ahead and thwart an entire prosecution regardless of the evidence and regardless of the fact that this system, the justice system in the U.S., which we all love, is built on that idea of fairness.
And so if people try to undermine that, that could undermine the American public's confidence in the system itself.
I'll also just give you a few examples.
There was the case in DC of the sandwich man who threw a subway sandwich at a National Guard member.
And the grand jury failed to indict.
And this group in their webinars really seems to suggest that this was a case of people who are on the jury who didn't really care about the evidence.
They go through this in detail, asking the participants of their webinars about, if you were on the jury, what would your excuse be for voting against indictment in this case?
And they all kind of list their examples.
And then, you know, the trainer gets up there and says, well, you can really give whatever or no explanation for your vote.
You can just simply vote against if you agree with the guy who assaulted the member of the National Guard.
And so that's one example.
And I think that there's going to be multiple of these.
They also cite the case of, you know, there was the case of six members of Congress who, you know, put out a video saying that members of the military should, in many cases, reject and turn down orders from Trump himself.
And those six members of Congress were not indicted because a grand jury decided that there was not enough evidence in that case.
So there are these examples and they're happening.
And, you know, my personal fear when I see this stuff is that it will spread to the Tyler Robinson trial.
It will spread to Luigi Mangioni.
It will spread to a number of other trials.
You know, I'm actually an energy reporter.
And one thing I've done is report on climate cases in which states and cities accuse the biggest oil companies of causing climate change.
And these are cases where billions of dollars are at stake.
So if you get one, you know, jury that with a couple of people on there who are activists and don't really care about the law, they could actually, with their vote, you know, really damage the economy by destroying the oil companies who are probably falsely being accused of causing weather events, you know, like hurricanes.
And so I think there's really a large impact that this could have moving forward.
You got to give it to lefties.
They are very organized in being very evil.
Yeah, they constantly open up new fronts in the assault on Western civilization.
And I'll be frank, I think I don't want to softpedal this.
This is one of the things that frightens me the most.
I've been thinking about it, you know, coming up for a long time, that this is a weakness in our system because it is in the Constitution that you need a jury verdict to convict somebody of a crime.
It is something that's been around in the Anglo-legal system for a very long time.
And if you have, you know, complete polarization along political lines or along racial lines where you can't assemble 12 people to consistently convict someone on any crime that has racial valence or political valence, the country is going to fly apart.
And this has happened before.
In, I believe, Ireland, under the British, there would be terrorist attacks on like British officials and like juries would just not convict.
And so they basically had to revoke the right to a jury trial in Ireland to make sure they could convict people of crimes.
In Britain right now, they're trying to revoke the right to a jury trial for any crime with a sentence of under three years.
They're just the general decay of their system.
And judges.
We also have judges.
Yes.
Yeah, we have judge problems.
And this is a right that has been so integral to American civilization, Western Anglo-civilization for so long.
And now we're seeing it being used to further tear it down.
Yeah, I think the left going back, I mean, it probably dates back further than that, but you see the rise of critical theory in the law schools going back to the 1980s.
They've identified our judicial system and our criminal justice system as a point of weakness for a long time that they're looking to exploit.
You know, it makes you think of the John Adams quote: you know, that our founding documents are only, you know, good for a moral and upright people, right?
They're wholly inadequate for any other.
So it makes you nervous when you see the degradation of our people that then filter into the system that we need to function correctly.
Final words here.
We got to get ready for hour two here in Secretary Chris Wright, who's coming up next.
But the floor is yours to wrap up this.
Yeah, I'll just make three quick points here.
Number one, this group, Freedom Trainers, is housed at a larger, pretty major nonprofit called Community Change.
Community Change is funded by kind of all the usual suspects, Rockefeller's, the Arabella Network, Open Society, which is George Soros's network, and then Hans Jorguese's network as well, who's another foreign billionaire influencing American politics.
Number two, they say they've already trained hundreds of thousands of people, which is a little alarming.
And number three, I will say that one of the leaders of this group, someone named Maria Steven, she was on the Colbert show recently as a sort of what he described her as a non-resistance or a non-violence resistance scholar, whatever that means.
And she talked about the dangers of ICE and how ICE officers can, again, reject orders from their higher ups in their course of doing business.
So those are kind of three points I wanted to make to kind of show people how prevalent this is right now and how really we need to start becoming more aware of this.
Those are really salient points.
So thank you for adding those.
You got to believe that there's got to be some law that these people have triggered that we can prosecute.
It's using really the historic strengths of our system against it.
Oh, it's kind of like immigration.
Yeah, kind of like our compassion or openness.
Thank you so much.
This is super fascinating, terrifying, but important for us to go through.
So thank you for making the time.
And sorry, the schedule got pushed back a little bit there.
Awesome.
Keep up the great work.
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We should be joined shortly by Secretary Chris Wright, Department of Energy, Secretary of U.S. Secretary of Energy.
Venezuela's Crude and Global Supply00:15:26
Big, big job right now because everybody's talking about oil, and I just checked it.
It is down 11% today.
It's down all over the place.
It's down.
Every single commodity is now just another cryptocurrency.
It can just swing 25% a day, you know, just because.
No, you're absolutely right.
It's it like we talk about how our brains get impacted by social media and by everything being digital.
And these things used to move like an oil tanker slowly.
They would turn slowly, but now everything's so quick.
You had a spike.
So on March, it looks like 6 at some point, it went from about $87 a barrel to $107.
Now, on some of the, I think, after hours trading, it spiked all the way up to almost $120.
But now it's been slowly coming down.
It's back at $84.73.
That is Brent crude oil per barrel.
There it is.
And it's going down.
So we're going to have Secretary Wright.
It looks like he's just getting seated.
So they're going to give me the go-ahead in just a second there.
But this is the big job right now for this administration.
There's a whole bunch of education that needs to happen.
And hopefully, Secretary Wright can walk us through how the price of oil then is translated, delayed, which a lot of people don't realize into the price of the pump.
And what we can do to bring down those costs, what we can do to get the Strait of Hormuz, which is effectively blocked right now.
How do we get that opened up?
What is it going to take?
Is it insurance, insuring the tankers?
Is it working with the oil companies?
Do we just have to keep bombing the hell out of Iran until they relinquish?
All right, I'm told Secretary Chris Wright is ready.
Welcome back to the show, Secretary.
You have a huge job right now.
You're looking at Venezuela.
You're looking at Iran.
You're making a lot of phone calls.
So thank you for making the time.
Tell us.
So the price of Brent crude is at $83.44 right now.
It's coming down.
Why is it coming down and what more can we do?
Well, Andrew, thanks for having me.
I appreciate you.
Appreciate all your viewership.
So yeah, the Straits of Hormuz that most of the Middle Eastern crude flows through have been effectively closed since this conflict started.
That's what drove them up.
And of course, the biggest answer here is to end Iran's ability to attack United States bases, terrorize their neighbors, and threaten oil supplies that they've been doing for 47 years.
So right now, you know, they are uncontrolled and they have so much armaments, they're able to scare shipping traffic off.
But every day, every hour, we're degrading the Iranian nation's ability to terrorize their neighbors, threaten energy supplies, and kill American soldiers.
This has been a 47-year-long conflict.
They've always put a premium on, raised energy prices higher than they should be because Iran always had the risk of this sort of wanton projection of their power over this critical waterway.
And so why they've retreated in the short run is the United States, in consultation with a bunch of other nations that are part of the International Energy Agency, have agreed or are in the process of working an agreement to release oil out of strategic petroleum reserves to replace a fair amount of the lost crude oil coming out of the straits.
So that will keep global oil markets supplied going forward.
There are oil stores around the world.
We do have surplus oil production capacity in the world, but a lot comes out of the Strait of Hormuz.
So the price and fear factor are raising prices because of the lack of flow of energy.
But ultimately, we need to degrade Iran's military ability to do what they're doing today and what they've threatened to do and on and off done for 47 years.
So with the solution, I've heard different ideas floated out, ensuring insurance for these tankers.
I've seen potential military escorts.
Are any steps being taken on either of those two fronts?
Oh, absolutely.
Those were the first steps we announced.
I was saying the recent movement in oil prices was because of the potential release coming.
The first things we announced was the commercial insurance market for ships.
You know, rates were going up and it wasn't clear if that market was really open.
So we've offered to reinsure the insurance companies, which will allow the insurance market to open back up.
But tied together with that is people will transit the strait when they believe the risk is relatively low.
So it's physical security for the ship captains to go through.
Now, we've had a large oil tanker went through the straits 48 hours ago.
We have others that are interested to try to do that.
But, you know, that's not clear yet whether we've degraded Iran's capacity to cause trouble enough to make transit safe.
One has gone through and it worked fine.
But there's still risks there.
Every day we're degrading them.
But when we degrade them enough that it seems like a ship escort with the U.S. military is enough to ensure safe travel, that'll be a great day.
And I think that's not too far away.
But somehow we need to get that energy flow into the world again.
And of course, the U.S. has a lot of levers to pull and are working this every day, every day.
So, Secretary, there's a whole piece to this where I think the average American consumer is a little uneducated about the price fluctuations, right?
So we've seen the price at the pump go up.
And I noticed that it was up even further today, even though the price of Brent has come down.
Can you just educate us on the time delay?
How does the pricing work?
Because, you know, the left will always say that the oil companies are conspiring against and using fear in the market to price gouge us and make a bunch of extra profits.
What's really going on?
No, this is just markets.
This is supply and demand.
You know, if you raise your gasoline prices up really fast before your cost of crude has gone up, your neighbor next door is going to eat your lunch by keeping his prices a little bit lower than your prices.
And gasoline is separate than crude oil.
You know, the U.S. exports gasoline.
We import gasoline.
Gasoline is traded all around the world.
It's very tied to the price of crude, but there are times where gasoline prices trade with different time lags and sometimes even different directions than crude price.
In the long run, they're very tied together, but they're separate markets.
And the market for diesel is separate and the market for jet fuel is different as well.
But Andrew, one key thing to think of here, we're going through a short-term dislocation and we are all feeling it.
The president is keenly aware, I think as everyone knows, of gasoline prices and diesel prices and costs for American consumers.
He is keenly aware.
In fact, it may seem backwards right now, but this war is in large part because of the president's concern of energy prices for American consumers over the long run.
Iran, who has been a threat to oil supplies, Iran who's driven the previous price spikes in the late 1970s, that was Iran that led to that huge price spike in the gas lines and all that.
That was Iran.
The president's seeing, boy, that same nation is arming itself massively with missiles so that they can make it so hard to attack them that no one will so they can finish building their nuclear weapons.
Imagine a nation that's so trouble-oriented to have nuclear weapons and a massive weapons arsenal, they could dictate to the world the price of energy.
And I think previous presidents were just kicking that can down the road.
Well, it didn't blow up on my watch, and that's kind of a risky thing, and they've kicked that can down the road.
This president's bold.
He thinks about American consumers, and he thinks long term.
That is not a situation the U.S. wants to go into.
They're arming themselves so hard right now in the negotiations.
They weren't indicating any willingness to not be massively armed and ultimate possessors of nuclear weapons.
And I think he rightly saw this window could close.
This window could close.
They could rain hell on our soldiers and make it very hard for us to push back on them.
And they could dictate global energy prices.
And that's not tolerable to President Trump.
Let's talk geopolitics here.
We saw what happened in Venezuela and that incredible military precision.
We're all in awe of our military, but that opened up a new supply with a cooperative country.
Have you seen the impacts of that yet?
Are we still kind of ramping up there?
Yeah, oil production is rising in Venezuela, and we're thrilled to see that so quickly.
You know, but to meaningfully add the global supply, that sort of six, 12, 18 months, it's not many years.
We'll see hundreds of thousands of barrels a day of additional production out of Venezuela before this year is over.
Very excited about that.
And of course, a huge reduction in drug running.
It was just at a summit of the Americas, and they said the murder rate has plummeted in Trinidad and Tobago because of the president's enforcement against running drugs on boats in the ocean there north of Venezuela.
So great progress in Venezuela.
Great progress.
Well, that's great to hear.
I mean, it seems like it could be the model in a place like Iran potentially if we get a leadership there that's also willing to cooperate.
I'm skeptical that we're there yet, but obviously that's the hope that this would be the last time we'd have to deal with a bad actor that's sowing terrorism throughout the region.
But I mean, could you, in theory, not see regime change and still get the ultimate result that we want, which is an end to the conflict, an end to the destruction, an end to the violence, and an end to the terrorism, and then a cooperative potential partner in that region.
Let's talk about potential positive outcomes in Iran if you don't see regime change.
Yes, look, of course, this operation was not premised on regime change.
It was premised on they're building up such a daunting supply of missiles that is shielding a nuclear program.
That's just unacceptable.
Whoever rules Iran cannot have an impenetrable mass of missiles with a nuclear weapons stockpile behind that.
So if we get a better regime, that would be great.
But as you said, we might get remnants of the existing regime, but they're so defanged in their ability to project power to support the terrorist proxy groups around the Middle East that they pivot their behavior.
How are they going to stay in power in their country if they're poorer, if they're not as much of a military power?
They better start to live a little better lives for their people.
So we have to degrade their military capacity.
That is the ultimate job of this mission.
But achieving that mission may have positive spin-off effects as well.
So we're told that China gets about 17% of its energy from Venezuela and Iran, right?
They were getting cut rate prices, black market, sanctioned oil.
Explain to the audience what this means from an energy standpoint for the CCP and Xi Jinping.
What are the felt impacts here and what are the long-term impacts?
Yeah, this is not good news for China.
Certainly, China has three discount oil suppliers, Venezuela, Iran, and Russia.
Venezuela is no longer a discount oil supplier to China.
In fact, most of Venezuela oil flies to the United States because it's cheaper to transport it here.
And it all sells at market prices.
So it's no longer cheap oil for China.
China's not happy about that.
They've lost a client state in the Western Hemisphere, as has Russia, and as has Iran.
So Venezuela is not just good for energy, it's good for geopolitics.
So we're thrilled with that development.
I'm sure China is very concerned about the same thing with Iran.
They've been getting very discounted Iranian crude.
And at the end of this, again, we don't know who's going to be leading Iran, but it will be a different Iran than going into this.
And an Iran with massively shrunken military capabilities, massively shrunken ability to terrorize American soldiers in the region, their neighbors, and global oil supplies.
So yeah, we're changing the calculus for China quite a bit with these two with these two changes in posture with these two nations.
Venezuela and Iran.
Yeah, and there was some news made that we kind of offered an olive branch, a couple days worth to Russia.
What's the logic there of allowing them to more freely trade oil?
Is it just to bring prices down or is there any concern there?
Yeah, no, so definitely not an olive branch to Russia.
This was no change in policy towards Russia.
Here's how China treats its discount oil suppliers.
You send your crude to us.
We'll unload it when we want.
We'll let it stack up in convoys, having to wait at sea for weeks or months at a time.
Because if we do that, we'll get to buy it from you even cheaper because you'll be desperate.
So there's a lot of just floating Russian oil.
It's going to be unloaded at Chinese refineries maybe 30 or 60 days from now.
But yet we have Indian refineries.
The second biggest importer of oil in the world after China is India.
So India was going to shut down some of their refineries, slow their production of gasoline and diesel, which they sell into the global market.
That pushes up prices for gasoline and diesel, even here in the United States.
So we said, hey, we're not changing our policy towards Russia, but for 30 days, go ahead and buy that Russian crude that's floating offshore.
Keep your refineries open, keep your energy production up, and absorb that oil.
So it's basically trying to replace or bring forward some of these lost barrels that aren't coming out of the straits.
It is not a change in our policy towards Russia.
There's a lot of floating Iranian crude off the oceans as well.
Now, of course, we have no change in policy for Iran as well.
But if we're short oil and we have pragmatic solutions to bring oil to market, you know, we're looking at all of those things.
That's about protecting American consumers.
Yeah, well, that's very good insight.
Thank you for that, actually.
I think that's an important distinction.
People need to understand that this has knock-on effects for even allies like India.
Last question here, Secretary.
I know your time is tight.
Protecting American Consumers00:03:54
The next steps in this process, I mean, everybody's wondering when this is going to end.
I know you don't have a crystal ball.
When will energy prices come back down?
When will the price of gas come back down?
What's your message to the American people?
So American people is, you know, God bless the American troops.
God bless President Trump's leadership.
The military progress has been tremendous.
We are massively degrading their ability, destroying their missile launchers, their missiles themselves, and their fabrication, their factories that build missiles, that build drones, that build all these weapons.
We're just degrading their ability to rain terror on their own citizens, on the American soldiers, and on the nations in that region.
And at the end of this, we want to remove Iran's ability, not just to threaten the military destruction they've done, but also their ability to threaten the flow of energy.
Ultimately, President Trump is doing this to lower the long-term cost of energy because the biggest threat to the flow of energy around the world is Iran, and Iran is going to be defanged.
So this is short-term pain, long-term gain.
Secretary Chris Wright at the Department of Energy, I just want people to understand.
He runs the Department of Energy, but he has more energy than just about anybody I've encountered in recent memory, besides maybe President Trump.
President Trump might have more energy, but you are an active, creative, energetic force at the Department of Energy.
So thank you for making the time.
And I just, I think you are one of the more fascinating.
There's so many in the admin.
We're blessed to have such a great administration, but you are truly a remarkable, remarkable leader of that department.
So thank you, sir.
We appreciate you taking the time and coming on with us today.
Thanks so much, Andrew.
And yeah, President Trump is indeed tireless.
I can't quite keep up with him, but I'm doing everything I can to be as close as possible to his work ethic and his energy level.
But yeah, he is a freak of nature.
But thank you, Andrew.
He is.
And you're doing a great job.
So keep up the great work.
I'm sure you'll get those that price the pump back down soon enough.
So God bless you.
We'll talk with you soon.
Thank you again.
Thanks so much.
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All right.
I'm excited about our next guest, Dr. Paul Ray.
He's a professor of history at Hillsdale College.
He's the chair of the Charles O. Lee and Louise Kay Lee Western Heritage Center.
Shah, Russians, and Cultural Resistance00:09:18
He's also the director for the Center of Military History and Strategy.
Ooh, that sounds fun.
So we want to talk to Dr. Paul Ray.
Welcome to the show, Doctor.
It's great to have you back.
You are a very accomplished gentleman.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And it's good to be back.
It's great to have you.
We want to talk about Iran.
And again, we're approaching this as an educational segment.
We want people to understand Iran better.
So what do people need to know about the people in the history of Iran better?
Well, the first thing to understand is the Iranians are an ancient nation, very much aware of themselves as a nation.
If you look at the Arab world, if you leave aside Egypt, none of the countries in the Arab world are really countries in the old-fashioned sense of the word.
The Egyptians have always been on their own, and they have a very powerful understanding of who they are.
The rest of the Arabs are part of Islam, and there's no Syria, there's no Iraq, that's a European creation.
But Iran is a nation.
And when Islam came to Iran, when they were conquered by the Arabs, they didn't switch their language.
They didn't go over to the language of the Quran.
They retained Persian.
So there was a kind of cultural resistance built on a pride in their nation.
That's extremely important for understanding them.
Now, if you look at recent history in that part of the world, I mean, look, they were a great empire in the 6th century BC.
It is Iran that was responsible for the Xerxes invasion of Greece.
If you look at the recent history of Iran, it's not been entirely positive.
It was a kind of plaything in the 19th century.
The oil in the south, the British exploited that.
Very little of the money went to the Iranian people.
And one consequence of this is the Khajar dynasty was overthrown by a general who then became Shah.
And it's the Shah's father, the father of the Shah that we knew 50 years ago.
The Pahlavi family took over.
And his goal was to restore the Iranian nation, to restore Persia to its strength.
And to do that, he had to get the Russians out.
They were threatening in the north and the English out of the south.
And he tried to play with the Germans during World War II as a way of getting rid of the English and the Russians.
And the English and Russians joined together and booted him and put his 16-year-old son, the Shah that we once knew, in power.
Now, these two people, the two Pahlavi Shahs, had a kind of goal for Iran.
Their model was Mustafa Kemal of the Ottoman Empire and then of Turkey, the man who came to be called Ataturk.
And what they wanted to do is to bring Iran into the 20th century.
So they were major modernizers.
Ataturk succeeded in this.
And he was able to succeed in this because after World War I, the allies that had won that war, the British, the French, the Italians, and so forth, the Greeks, wanted to split up Anatolia among them.
And he was sent.
He had been the hero of the Battle of Gallipoli fighting against the British.
He was sent by the Sultan to disarm the population of Anatolia, and he did the opposite.
He turned them into an army.
He defeated the Greeks, drove them out.
The Italians, the French, and the British withdrew, and he created modern Turkey.
So he was a hero.
And as a hero, he was able to get away with a great deal.
And what did he try to do?
Well, he tried to push Islam into the private sector to create a secular state.
He abolished the caliphate, which went all the way back to the time when Muhammad died.
When they set up radio stations, right in the beginning, half of the radio announcers in the 1920s were women, half of them men.
Took a long time for Barbara Walters to become an announcer in the United States.
Think of that difference.
In 1950, there were more women teaching at Turkish universities than in American universities.
More women chairing departments in universities than in American universities.
Same thing was true for Egypt.
So there was a kind of modernizing movement that swept the Islamic world, Egypt as well as Iran.
But the Pahlavis weren't heroes.
They didn't have the advantages he had, and they ran into trouble both from the British and the Russians, as I explained, but also from the mullahs, who did not want Turkey to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century.
Iran.
Iran, right, yeah.
Yeah.
Iran, you're actually right.
So what happens in the 50s and 60s is that the younger of the two Shahs achieves some success by using the Americans to get the British out.
And arrangements are worked out so that a great deal of the proceeds from the oil that came from Iran ended up in the hands of the government.
What did they do?
They built roads.
They built schools.
They built hospitals.
They sent large numbers of Iranian students abroad to study.
At the time of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, there were 50,000 Iranian students studying in the United States.
And they were buying a great deal for Iran.
There were 50,000 Americans living in Tehran, mostly businessmen, selling them weapons and everything you could imagine.
This attempt to get them rapidly moving into the 20th century upset people.
A lot of the students who went to the United States were radicalized and came back wanting to throw out the Shah.
A fair number of them were communists.
Then there were the rural people who were devout and the mullahs.
One of the things that the younger Shah did was called the Green Revolution.
He took land away from the great landowners, including the mullahs, and he distributed it among the peasants of Iran.
So what builds up gradually is a kind of explosion.
There are two parties to this explosion.
On the one hand, there's the religious party led by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was a man of cunning, ruthlessness, and eloquence.
On the other hand, there was a mass of people with no particular direction and no particular leader.
The people from the leading families in Tehran, the younger people, and the ones who had studied in the United States.
The consequence is when the crisis came in 1979, Khomeini managed to fool the urban population, this modernizing population, into thinking that they could live with him perfectly well.
The revolution takes place.
The Shaw is pushed out.
He was a dying man at that time, dying of cancer.
And Khomeini then edges out the urban population.
And he establishes something like a totalitarian regime.
The other day I gave a talk here at Hillsdale College on this.
And I woke up in the morning and I asked myself, I wonder if there are commissars in the Revolutionary Guard and in the Iranian Army.
That is to say, political officers.
In Russia, this was the people from the party who watched over the military guys, watched over all of the officers.
Faith as the Ultimate Command00:10:10
And I went to AI, that source of great wisdom.
And on this occasion, it really was a source of wisdom because it provided very good detail on this.
And yes, there are commissars in the Iranian army.
So this is a regime of surveillance in which the Guardians are surveilled also by mullahs who serve as political officers.
They can arrest any one of the officers of the military officers.
They can reverse any decision that a military officer makes.
This is quite a well-disciplined, well-organized regime.
If you knew Charlie Kirk, you knew this.
He was a connector.
Charlie believed in finding good people and connecting them with other good people that he cared about.
When someone truly took care of him, Charlie would never hesitate to recommend them.
Andrew Del Rey and Todd Avakin were two of those people.
They personally helped Charlie and Erica with their mortgage needs, and Charlie trusted them completely.
Whether it was a home buyer trying to qualify or someone needing to consolidate debt or see if they could get a lower rate in payments, these were the guys Charlie sent people to.
And right now, timing matters.
The market has shifted and rates have come down.
There's more inventory.
Bidding wars have cooled and buyers finally have more control.
But that window won't stay open forever.
As rates come down, competition will return.
That's why being prepared now is so important.
Andrew and Todd at Union Home Mortgage bring over 40 years of combined experience and guide you through the process clearly.
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That is AndrewandTodd.com.
As Blake mentioned earlier, it is the six-month anniversary of us.
I don't call it an anniversary.
It's a six-month mark of losing Charlie.
And the team has a tribute video in honor of the great Charlie Kirk, our friend.
We wanted to play it for you.
Play Cut 10.
This is why your faith is the most important thing.
You are commanded to go do something productive with your life.
You are not commanded to go sit idly by and just receive.
You are commanded to go give and to produce and to risk to then go sow into other people.
That is a biblical idea that has made the world a profoundly better place.
We must put God first in everything that we do.
We are nothing here, but just for a short instant, short little glimpse.
We act not out of outcome, but we act out of obedience.
Everybody, this was not earned.
You guys were a vessel.
We were a vessel.
Psalm 107.1.
Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever.
I have to say this without getting emotional, but I'm very proud of my husband.
You are so intentional with your faith, and you are so intentional with just how you are as a father and a husband.
Becoming a father has made me, first of all, understand that what I'm fighting for is beyond even yourself.
We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities and darkness and spirits.
Because at its core, what we are fighting is a spiritual battle.
And if you're here and you don't believe in God, okay, fine, I'll pray for you.
And I hope you find Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior because it will change your life.
How do you want to be remembered?
I want to be remembered for courage for my faith.
That would be the most important thing.
most important thing is my faith in my life.
We miss you, Charlie.
Six months.
Doesn't feel real.
Still.
Six months almost exactly.
Yeah.
Lost him on September 10th, and it is March 10th.
So here's to you, Charlie.
And we had to play it.
This is his show.
It will always be his show.
So, Blake, any thoughts?
You know, it's Erica said that if Charlie was given the choice to undo what happened and come back, he wouldn't, she thought, because of what was unleashed by it.
I like to.
I've gone a couple times in the last week or so where we have one of the buildings here on the campus.
Just all of the mail packages gifts we've received or that people have left outside the campus, which we still encourage people to come.
We still see people there.
So if you're passing through Phoenix, stop by.
We love to see people make a visit.
But I look at that and we still get the emails as well, people talking about they started going to church because of Charlie.
They kept going to church because of Charlie.
Some of them, we even get ones where they say, I'm not really sure if I believe God exists, but I'm still going because Charlie said to.
And we want to encourage that.
Leave your heart open.
And we've seen so many cases of that.
And I think Charlie would even say, if it would help one other person come to Christ, my martyrdom, it would be worth it.
And we're not seeing, it's not one person, it's hundreds, thousands, maybe around the world, hundreds, millions.
Because it truly did have a global impact.
And it's also true that because of what happened to him, we never have to see Charlie lose his fastball.
We never have to see Charlie get old, become tired.
He's always as he was.
I would have loved him.
He's that brave young hero going out onto the campuses, speaking to young people, reaching young people.
And we'll always have that example.
Even Dr. Ray, I know you're hanging in there.
Maybe a little pivot on the six-month mark of losing Charlie.
You're a historian.
What did Charlie's contribution and what happened?
What did it mean historically?
In the whole scheme of things, what does it mean to you?
Well, he started something and he was sufficiently a force that I don't think it's simply going to stop.
I mean, you're continuing his show.
I was on his show when he was still with us back in July and August a couple times.
And I was struck by his energy, his sincerity, his open-mindedness.
He was interested in listening as well as in talking.
But the other thing is he was a young man who moved a great many people.
And I don't think that's going to stop.
And obviously, you don't think it's going to stop, or you wouldn't be continuing the Charlie Kirk show.
Correct.
Yeah, and he enjoyed his conversations with you, Doctor.
I know that.
And you bring a wealth.
I literally was sitting here the whole time.
Just You provided context to the Middle East that I was not aware of between the Turks and the Egyptians and the Iranians.
And he loved learning.
He loved, that's why he loved Hillsdale.
You know, he called it the beacon of the north, America's greatest university college.
And you guys are continuing that on, and we're continuing to work with you guys, and we're continuing to work with Dr. Arne.
And we just really appreciate your perspective.
I know this was a pivot that I didn't prepare you for, Doctor, but you've handled it brilliantly.
And it's a credit to Hillsdale College that you are part of their faculty.
And you guys can all learn from the great professors at Hillsdale.
Go to Charlie for Hillsdale.
It's not why we had Dr. Ray on.
We wanted to learn about the history of the region, but check it out because Hillsdale is one of these institutions that makes America so special.
It preserves, it's like salt, that you preserve these great ideas for another generation.
So check it out, Charlie for Hillsdale.
Final word to you, Professor Ray.
Okay.
I'll tell you a story.
I spent some years in Turkey, 84 to 86, and I went back there in 2002, met a group of Turkish journalists, one Iranian journalist, with them.
And at that time, there were pro-American demonstrations at soccer games by just people doing it, chanting in favor of America.
And I thought maybe this is the time the revolution is going to go under.
And I asked the Iranian journalist, and he said, no, the people who handle security in Iran were graduate students in Eastern Europe in the communist period.
They know how to handle a crowd.
And then he added, What they don't know how to handle is their own children.
There will be a counter-revolution in Iran, he said, but it's going to take some time.
Well, some time has passed, but maybe not enough time.
We will see in the next few weeks.
Dr. Ray, Professor Ray, thank you so much for your time.
Pleasure to be with you again.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.