Ground War, Marriage, Music, and More ft. Megan Basham, Mollie Hemingway, and Sean Davis
Charlie Kirk, Megan Basham, Mollie Hemingway, and Sean Davis confront the Pentagon's potential ground invasion of Iran, criticizing Democratic narratives while debating the filibuster's role in blocking the SAVE Act. They defend Trevor Sheets' wife against hypocrisy claims regarding her past promiscuity, analyze the cultural impact of the Lord of the Rings movie by Stephen Colbert, and warn that modern education systems designed to remove parental authority fuel radicalization. Ultimately, the discussion urges a return to moral values and economic stability to prevent societal collapse under current political pressures. [Automatically generated summary]
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You got to stop sending your kids to college.
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Go find out how your church can get involved.
Sign up and become an activist.
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Most important decision I ever made in my life.
And I encourage you to do the same.
Here I am, Lord Museman.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
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All right, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.
So there is lots going on right now.
There's CPAC, which is happening in Texas.
It's opening day for the Cubs.
It's opening day for, well, I mean, I think it was opening day yesterday.
Yeah, but the Cubs didn't play.
Today is the first game for the Cubs.
And I think they technically call this opening day.
Yeah, technically today is, but they did a Yankees Giants game last night on Netflix.
So yeah, Charlie was a huge Cubs fan.
So go Cubbies and go.
They'll probably be better than the Twins.
Go Dodgers.
I can't remember.
I keep forgetting that you were.
Everyone forgets about the Twins because they're a very forgettable team, especially now.
Kirby Puckett was amazing.
Yes, he was.
Joe Mauer was great, and they'll probably never be great again because they have those owners who kind of treat their baseball teams the way the Democratic Party treats America.
This like husk to extract value from and then abandon.
I've never seen him give me crazy eyes like that.
That hit you at a deep childhood trauma level.
It's very sad.
It's very sad.
I'm stuck with this team that's never going to win.
But the Cubs might win.
We'll be pulling for that.
You know, everybody's mad at the Dodgers forgetting Tucker, who was the, I think, the top sort of free agent on the market this offseason.
Everybody's mad at the Dodge.
We just don't want baseball to go the same way that soccer goes in all those other countries where there's two teams ever allowed to win the title.
It's good for baseball to have a villain, Blake.
It's good.
Makes everybody hate the Dodgers, which makes every game that they play way more interesting and fun.
It's more fun to hate the Yankees, though.
No, you can hate the Yankees and the Dodgers.
That's fair.
That's fair.
So the big news today is the Pentagon is weighing what they're calling a final blow option against Iran.
Do you think it's going to be called like Operation Final Blow?
I hope not.
They've been giving him some funny names.
Well, Operation Epic Fury.
I actually think that's an epic name.
I think it's great.
So here's the news from Axios.
Among the options, so these are including ground operations and a massive bombing campaign, according to a report Thursday from Axios.
Among the options under consideration are seizing or blockading key Iranian positions, including Karg Island.
We've heard a lot about Karg Island, the country's main oil export hub, as well as the strategic islands of Abu Musa and Larak near the Strait of Hormuz.
Axios reported citing U.S. officials and sources familiar with internal deliberation.
Other scenarios include targeting Iranian oil shipments or conducting large-scale strikes on nuclear facilities, it added.
And President Trump has reportedly not made up his mind.
But what we know is that all of the chess pieces are in place to do something like this.
And Blake, we've seen this before where President Trump sort of mobilizes in a region and you're thinking, oh, it's bluster, saber-rattling.
But lately, he's tended to just kind of press the go-to.
Yes.
And I mean, we were thinking about, I guess, it was initially just the air assets, but they did start moving these a few weeks ago.
And as you say, it could be two things.
It could be show I'm very serious so that they have the pressure to make a deal, but more so than a lot of people and more so than himself in the past, he appears ready to push through with it.
I think we would love to have all of your emails about what you support on this because we're of two minds on this.
We're already in the conflict.
We do want to win that conflict since it's begun.
But I am thinking always of the discussions we'd have with Charlie and the way that, okay, if this isn't what wins it, it's now just another step towards we have a bunch of troops now on the ground in the area.
And then if it doesn't end the war, the pressure will be, well, you could send more troops and escalate more, and then that will end it.
Yeah, well, CNN's even reporting on this.
So let's get their coverage on it.
By the way, you know, CNN was famously denying that there was any negotiations going on, and then they eventually had to backtrack and say, yes, there were negotiations on a deal going on.
Iran has reportedly declined.
So here we go.
We're building up SAT-20.
Well, Audi, whatever the president ultimately decides about a ground operation in Iran, all the pieces are now in the region to carry one out.
And it's not just the thousand paratroopers.
You have Marines deployed to the region, and then all the forces, the air transport, et cetera, that one would require to put troops on the ground.
Whether that be, you've heard the discussion of Karg Island, which is so central to Iran's energy industry, or perhaps along the shores of the Strait of Hormuz to secure the Strait of Hormuz, we don't know.
And ultimately, it's up to the president.
So all the pieces are on the board.
Please send us your emails, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
We want to hear what you think.
I'm just going to be really honest.
I hate it.
I don't want to see ground troops in Iran.
I would love for the people of Iran themselves to rise up.
And it's, you know, there's another report that B.B. Netanyahu suggested that we now give the signal to the Iranian people to rise up in the streets.
And President Trump rebuffed that and said they'll get mowed down.
I mean, I think we saw, they clearly were leaning that way when it first began.
Remember when the first strikes threw in, a lot of the rhetoric from the president was the Iranian people take back your country.
He was clearly gesturing towards something like that happening.
And in truth, I think they expected that to happen.
And then it didn't.
There wasn't a big strong upsurge.
Well, I think, you know, I've been calling around on this.
They are waiting for the signal to go.
And they can give them the signal.
I think the Reza Pavlavi could give the signal and it would probably generate some movement.
But again, I don't think President Trump thinks it's safe for them to do so yet.
It probably isn't.
And it's difficult because, I mean, what we could do is we could give the signal and then just explicitly launch airstrikes on behalf of those people.
But it's difficult to coordinate with a fundamentally uncoordinated mass.
It's difficult.
It's easy to do airstrikes on a facility, on a base, even on a ship, but on a bunch of guys running around with AKs.
You know, it's difficult.
It's an interesting idea because I met some Persian folks recently and they were basically telling me the people are ready to rise up when the signal is given.
And I said, well, are they armed?
He said, no, they're not.
Well, I said, well, then the IRGC is armed and they're going to get mowed down again.
Basically what Trump said.
An interesting potential of having, you know, the 82nd Airborne, these Marines in position.
I mean, in theory, again, I don't love this job falling to us, but maybe a potentiality here is that they give the signal to go and these guys basically become like a protector force.
You know, I don't know.
It sounds like a terrible idea.
I'm just saying maybe that's one of the options on the table.
We've repeatedly wanted uprisings to sort of efficiently and easily solve our problems in the Middle East.
And there's often this idea that any government we're fighting has this 0% approval rating that will crumble as soon as you blow up a few guys.
And unfortunately, I think it's clear there's at least a pretty large mass of Iranians who do support this regime.
And there might be more now because they're at war.
Wars radicalize people in a country.
Yeah.
Well, and the factions within an old country, an ancient culture like Iran, are going to be deeper than in a country like Venezuela, right?
So we're just going to have to see how this plays out.
I just watched A Great Awakening.
And I have to tell you, this isn't just another historical drama.
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We spend so much time talking about 1776 and constitutions and congresses and declarations, but this film reminds you of something even deeper.
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And yet watching this film, you see how his fearless proclamation of liberty in Christ shook the colonies to their core.
It unified people who had nothing else uniting him.
And that is power.
What really struck me was the portrayal of Benjamin Franklin.
A Great Awakening Film00:14:54
He's this brilliant, rational mind, and yet he's drawn into genuine friendship with Whitfield, not because he suddenly becomes someone else, but because he begins to see freedom isn't structural.
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The film makes one thing clear.
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Without further ado, so excited to have Megan Basham in studio in Phoenix.
I know.
I'm so excited to be here.
I've done the show so many times, but I've never been here in person.
So now I feel like real.
We like to keep you.
Have you ever been in God's Furnace before?
I haven't.
And it is actually, well, okay, I grew up in Arizona.
Okay.
So I thought you were talking about the building.
I'm like, it's actually very cool in here.
Oh, no, no.
It's very cool in here.
No, the building is not.
No, but Phoenix is in the middle.
Hopefully this is more like holy ground than God's Furnace.
Yeah, no, but yeah, I grew up in Phoenix.
So yes, we fled the summer oven door open experience like many years ago.
Okay.
Yeah, but you're, what are you in Tennessee?
Charlotte, North Carolina, yeah.
Oh, because the I was headquarters are in Tennessee.
I was thinking of Daily Wire.
Yeah.
So you get hot and you get the humidity.
So I don't know what I think I'd actually prefer the dry oven heat for four months as opposed to.
And this is unseasonably warm.
Yeah, this is, and I knew that.
So, I mean, like, you know, we're, we're Arizona born and bred.
So we know that you guys are having freakish weather.
That's great.
Okay, so we actually were planning on having a conversation about this earlier in the week than the Joe Kent stuff.
And we brought Schellenberger on.
And then you were like, well, I'm going to be in Phoenix anyway.
I was like, well, then we're just going to do it then.
So it's a bit of abrupt pivot because we were talking about ground troops and things.
And Blake kind of laughed at the break.
He's like, that was an awkward pivot.
I was like, yeah, I know.
We're going from ground invasion to promiscuity in Virginia.
So this tweet took over X, which was pretty impressive because there's a lot going on.
Blake, give us the rundown here.
Well, so what it was is it went astonishingly viral.
Was a Christian man named Trevor, Trevor Sheets, and he just does kind of a post, and I don't know that we want to read the whole thing, but it was basically the opening line of it, which is what I think got a lot of people's attention, was my wife was formerly promiscuous.
I was a virgin.
She was then radically born again, committed to church, evangelized constantly, Puritan books in her bedroom, prayer journals, grief over past sexual sin, etc.
We got to know each other over each other well, over a year, dated for four months, engaged for two and a half, and didn't sin sexually with one another.
Our first kiss was on the altar of our wedding day.
Goes on, talks about they've been married for several years now, they have children, and all of these things.
And then there's a photo at the bottom of their wedding, which is very nice.
This has gotten 35 million views on it.
That's like Nick Shirley levels of view count.
And it's been very divisive, as we know, because some people say this is a perfectly fine testament.
Some people say it's TMI.
Some people say, I mean, we'll get your take on this.
Some people, it really is a Warshaw test because some people think, is this wallowing in a sin?
Is this throwing your wife under the bus?
Is this the right way to approach a topic like that?
And he wanted to discuss.
His wife is a whore.
Right.
He said she's a former.
Formerly promiscuous.
I mean, it was literally five words that like blew up the internet.
Blew up the internet.
Yeah.
So what's your take on this, Megan?
Okay, so I have a different take.
Don't be so nuanced that my eyes glaze up.
Nuance is not usually my problem.
So, you know, a couple of data points I want to bring to this story.
One is that this woman was a girl at the time these things were going on.
She was under 18 years old.
You told me this was a moment.
She became a Christian at 17.
So the guys who are having a really good time calling her a whore and much, much worse, are not recognizing that they're actually talking about the activities of someone when she was legally a child.
So, you know, I don't know her story.
I don't know what went on in her background, but I she's been very public about it, by the way.
Before this, this is sort of part of their ministry, I think, together.
Right.
And I mean, and she, I read her full testimony, and I think she said it started around 15.
So, you know, 15 to 17, maybe was a little younger than that.
But my point being, usually there is some traumatic things in someone's background when they've had that experience by 17 years old.
So she became a Christian at 17.
And the other thing I want to correct is there was a ton of guys out there saying, like, oh, she's, they were basically equating her to Nala Ray, like saying, okay, so you were like a webcam girl and you were promiscuous.
And, you know, they described it in much worse terms, but then you pivoted to become a Christian influencer.
And I'm like, no, this woman became a Christian almost 10 years ago.
So it's not like she's like, oh, yeah, yesterday I was on OnlyFans, but now I'm building up my platform by saying I'm reformed.
This woman actually did the steps of repentance and got married and has been living, you know, quietly.
She has three kids.
Yeah, this is not somebody who like immediately was like, now embrace me as a Christian influencer.
I mean, she's, she's shown repentance and she's shown fruit in keeping with repentance.
So I'm like, this is not that kind of story.
And I understand the resentment of young guys going, okay, so the second you say I'm a Christian now, even though five minutes ago I was on OnlyFans, I'm going to keep all the money.
And in fact, I'm going to continue to make money now on my reform story.
I get the suspicion of that.
I get the cynicism.
That's not this woman.
So, you know, that's something else I would want to emphasize because I think people didn't do enough research.
And I actually communicated with her a little bit.
Yeah.
So we were messaging and I just said, were you embarrassed by what your husband put out there?
And just as she said, I think in a clip that we have, she was very clear with me.
No, I've been very public about my testimony.
I wasn't embarrassed.
My husband knew that he is free to talk about this.
And to the degree that he talked about it, and we can debate the wisdom of the forum in which he talked about it.
But this man, according to what Ashley Sheets told me, was very clear that he had his wife's permission to discuss this topic.
Well, we have that clip.
I think this is what it is, Sat 25.
He showed me that I was, my promiscuity was a sin against God, and I deserved help.
But Jesus paid for all my sin.
And all I have to do is to repent and trust alone in Jesus.
And I will be new.
And that night I gave my life to Jesus.
That person who was promiscuous is dead.
She's gone.
And I am new in Christ.
And that is why I have no shame anymore.
Because God looks at me as clean and robed in Christ's righteousness.
It's a beautiful clip, actually.
But the use of the word promiscuous is still like, it hits every time she says it.
It's like, ugh, can you?
It's not a word you hear much these days.
Yeah, it's not.
But that's a beautiful clip.
And theologically, it's accurate.
Yeah.
And something else she said in that interview, if you watched it, and I thought, this is so different from what we have gotten from the Me Too movement, which is that a lot of women who obviously participated in some level in consensual sexual sin, then later come back and go.
They rewrite it.
Right.
I was traumatized.
I was, I didn't, you know, I was abused, even though, you know, they willingly participated if there's some power imbalance.
This, this woman was actually a minor when these things happen.
And yet she's very clearly taking responsibility for her own sinful choices.
And you don't see that often.
I mean, I think part of what you hear from Ashley Sheets and using the word promiscuity is she's trying not to minimize her background.
I think you're right.
And, you know, it's funny because the guys were showing me this at the office the day it was kind of blowing up.
And they were like, what are your thoughts?
What are your thoughts?
And I read it.
I was like, honestly, I think it's, you know, it's accurate.
Like, theologically, as a Christian, like, everything she said here is.
I love the verses they quote.
And he quotes several different verses.
You know, he mentions the parable about debts being forgiven.
And then her many sins have been forgiven.
That is why she loved much.
The one who has forgiven little loves little.
If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.
The old has passed away.
And see, the new has come.
That's from Corinthians.
That's right.
But I could tell just on the fact that everybody was showing it to me.
Like, you know, you look at the comments, like, delete this, delete this.
Not too late to delete this.
Oh, wait, it is.
And everybody just kind of piling on.
I mean, here's the thing.
X is a really mean place.
Yeah.
It's an extraordinarily mean place.
So was this a good forum?
Yeah, it's an extraordinarily mean place.
Like, just, you know, we can attest to that in the last six months.
But so I think that was more of the intrigue for me is just to see the way people reacted.
And it didn't trigger me when I saw.
That being said, you know, I understood that given the forum, the way that that first line was in there.
And now people are alleging that it was part of this building a platform and that he's a Christian marketing guy.
And so he knew what he was doing.
I don't know.
I don't think I buy that.
I don't really either.
In part because, again, I mean, it was like almost 10 years ago that, you know, this happened, that she came to Christ.
So I'm like, you know, she's been pretty public with her testimony since then.
I think she wrote about it in 2019.
It's her pinned tweet.
It's been there since 2019.
So, you know, I don't think we can read their motives right there.
So I'm going to go, I think everybody who's saying we know why they're doing that, we can't know that.
Yeah, I mean, I agree.
But it kind of does, you hit on a vein here that I think has a lot of rich stuff to explore because we had a guy named Gabe Saint in the studio yesterday, and he was talking about the animosity and the resentment between the sexes, especially with Gen Z.
And there is a distortion of, you know, what young women expect from their men and what young men are even capable of providing.
He kept using this word simps, that they were kind of these beta male, these sort of weak men that don't know how to lead.
They don't know how to be masculine.
And then the ones that do, they're not free to be strong and masculine.
And the women want the men to accept all this responsibility, be the provider, take care of them, bring them flowers, take them on dates, pay for dinner, but they don't give them any authority in the relationship.
So they're just expecting the men to sort of worship them and revolve around them.
And it feels like there is this healthy imbalance.
And you talked about you understood the suspicion that women get to be sort of promiscuous.
And then when they just claim the name of Jesus, good men have to take them back or something.
There is a lot there because actually what's underlying a lot of this is a really unhealthy, I think, relationship between the sexes.
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So we are getting into this dynamic, this unhealthy imbalance between the sexes.
This is a crazy stat.
63% of young men between the ages of 18 and 29 report being single compared to only 34% of women for the same age group.
Correct.
The maths don't math, first of all.
So somebody's not telling somebody what's really going on here.
They're dating older men or some men are dating multiple women.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that's classic.
Yeah.
So, but there is resentment that is building.
And again, I go back to Gabe Saint.
He's our turning point chapter president at the University of Wyoming.
He explained this, you know, he said it's even amongst conservatives that share ostensibly the same value set.
What do you make of it?
So, you know, a couple of things.
One, it was funny that I ended up sort of being on the receiving end of some of the hostility over the last couple of days when I came to this woman's defense because I have been very outspoken that I believe the longhouse is real and it's a real problem.
And I'm actually working on a book on this that I'm like, I do believe that we are increasingly living in a gynocracy.
You hear that term, which essentially means that it is a female-dominated culture.
Helen Andrews.
Very Helen Andrews.
And can I tell you, I posted a clip.
For younger people, you're in the longhouse.
Right.
And I have gone, you know, to the mattresses fighting some of these evangelical influencers who have denied that the longhouse is real.
I'm like, it is absolutely real.
We are living in an extraordinary mean.
It's the idea in ancient times, everyone lived in a big long house and you could get bossed around by women who would nag you, basically.
And so that's the online term.
Just explaining for all of our boomer viewers.
But so at the same time, I watched this very bitter, angry reaction from so many young men over the last 48 hours to this post.
And one, I think they are projecting all kinds of things onto this couple and in particular this woman that I'm like, you don't know her background, you don't understand.
And you're assuming that she is like sort of any cam girl who is just, you know, on a dime, said, now I'm a Christian.
And so now buy my new merch that's, you know, Christian-branded merch.
This is not this woman.
Redemption vs Sinful Ways00:12:30
But I think a lot of that bitterness, as we said, 63% of young men say they're single.
Only 34% of young women say they're single.
That's creating bitterness.
By the way, and Gabe is saying that a lot of young men are just opting out.
Right.
And like they, there are stats showing that roughly half of young men have not dated in the last year.
So you have a lot of young men who are just simply not romantically involved with anyone.
They're not pursuing women.
And so I understand, and I don't want to use that term in self because I understand that that's offensive.
But a lot of them are probably either wasting away like on Twitch and video games and porn.
And I mean, honestly, it's a bad, it's not a good ending to this story.
And that's what I want to come at is that there's so much fault on both sides.
I understand that.
But when we look at these things and we talk about these things, we have to be able to talk about them.
We have to talk about the real reality of young men being isolated, not pursuing women, not dating.
It's a statistical reality.
It is not meant to disparage anyone or to insult anyone.
It's just to acknowledge what's happening here and that it would very understandably engender feelings of anger and resentment.
But the thing to do is not, you know, projected all over this girl who has been saved and was saved 10 years ago.
And the other thing, I think there is a false perception by young men because of this, that young women are more promiscuous than they used to be.
Statistically, that's not true.
They're actually across the board.
Everyone is having sex.
Everyone's having less sex.
They stay inside.
They have fewer friends.
They go to fewer events.
Yeah, everyone's just sort of seceding from society.
But men are doing so more than women.
Yeah.
Probably.
Men have an easier time doing it.
I'll be frank.
Like, men have an easier time being solitary.
They are, they find things like, as you said, like video games, internet stuff.
They find that all more appealing.
They're less socially oriented.
And so I think a big answer is like they actually do just have an easier time getting by alone.
I want to bring up this Nala Ray thing because I remember Charlie had Nala on the podcast.
And, you know, everybody's like, you know, you shouldn't be lifting her up as some like influencer, some leader.
And that was not the spirit of why he had Nala on.
He had her on to warn young women away from OnlyFans.
Right.
And I thought that was admirable because actually our disposition is much more sympathetic to, you know, the prodigal son story, the bringing in, like, we believe that change is real.
If you don't, then you're not a Christian.
Like, you can be born again.
The old is gone.
The new has come.
You can be clothed in Christ.
You can be clothed in redemption.
If that's not true, then what are we even doing here?
And I understand that you don't want to lift those people up too soon.
You know, be careful who you lay hands on.
Get that, but that's that was not why we had Nala on because Nala was warning against this really coercive, addiction-riddled sort of lifestyle where you're an online prostitute.
I mean, that's what you are.
And I thought that was fine.
I don't know Nala's heart.
I don't know what her ultimate motives were if she was just sort of taking the influencer world and transposing it onto a Christian setting.
I don't know, but I think it's important to warn people about this.
But you, what's your, I'm just curious what, like, what your take is on the Nala Ray thing, because we, that was a huge blowup for us.
Yeah, and you know, part of what I think we don't talk about with that is that there's this perception that all of these young women just go, I want to get on a webcam and make lots of money.
Two problems with that.
One, that's not, I've talked to people in that world, and that's not typically how it goes down.
How it goes down is there are a lot of OnlyFans agencies now that deceptively recruit these young women.
So they scout on Instagram and they will look for girls who are maybe, and girls, you know, 16, 17 can be very dumb.
And they will post bikini pictures and things.
And there are OnlyFans agents who go trolling and they find those girls and they start to build a relationship with them.
And what they want is so the second they turn 18, they can then transfer them to OnlyFans and take a big cut of their earnings.
So that's one.
So people don't know that you actually have OnlyFans agencies preying on stupid teenage girls.
The founder just died of cancer at 43.
Noteworthy.
Yeah.
And I, you know, all I subscribe to is.
Yeah, when I saw that was, what does it profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul?
Lose his soul.
I wouldn't want to be on the, I wouldn't want to see his welcoming committee.
That's all.
Yeah.
And the other point of this is that there's this perception that all of these women on OnlyFans are making tons of money.
The vast majority don't.
They make about the average is about $1,000 a month.
I don't think it's a month.
Oh, geez.
No, I think it's like ever.
Yeah.
Like they'll go on, they'll make a little bit of money and then they get off.
I mean, not that it's really that much better if you make a lot of money, but it is just exceptionally evil about something that leaves an indelible mark on, like, well, I don't want to say indelible.
Jesus can clear a lot, but it's huge damage on your soul, on your personality, on your ability to live a normal life ever after.
And yeah, and you get nothing for it.
Just chews and spits people up.
Right.
And so I think there is this perception that these women are profiting and no one's holding them accountable and they're getting away with it.
And, you know, a couple things to say about that.
One, ultimately, in light of eternity, nobody's going to get away with anything.
The person who can read our hearts perfectly is going to know whether or not you were truly repentant.
So you want to encourage these young Christian men, hey, nobody's going to pull the wool over God's eyes.
You know, there will be accountability eventually.
But in the meantime, instead of attacking this individual woman, we need to talk about why we got to this place that young men and young women are not finding each other and finding relationships.
So I wanted to ask, just so we are, as you said, we have the problem that young people are splitting apart.
Another debate that was going on in the last few days, there was a woman who on, I believe a woman on X who basically said, it's not appropriate to ask people to date like in a church setting.
That's not what women are.
I was so horrified by that.
That's the best thing.
I saw you definitely disagree with that.
But more generally, I guess, what should the approach of churches or just conservative movement stuff generally be towards this crisis?
Because it will destroy human civilization.
Right.
And so up to now, I think the church has now realized they've handled it abominably.
I mean, I can show you just a couple of years ago, you have essays at like the Gospel Coalition and places like that saying, we have to stop making marriage an idol.
We have to not make family an idol.
And it's very much that proverbial C.S. Lewis quote about you have these guys running around with fire extinguishers to put out floods.
That's essentially what they're doing.
Because you're like, we have a massive problem of a crashing birth rate, a crashing marriage rate.
And in the meantime, the church has been telling us, don't idolize marriage and family.
And I'm like, I don't think that's our problem right now.
So, you know, that's first is that we actually have to acknowledge that it is very important civilizationally that we form families.
And that is scriptural.
You know, it's biblical that we recognize the building block of mother, father, children.
So, you know, that's the first part.
The second part is the messaging absolutely needs to be, no, you should be looking for your spouse at church.
Where better to look for your spouse?
And, you know, that also, I would say, we also need to have an education of young women in how to be gracious in saying no, thank you.
So that if a young man asks one woman out and she's not that interested at church, if he then, you know, a few weeks later or a couple months later asks out her friend, that first girl should not go and say, oh, he's so creepy.
He asked me out too.
I mean, that's the kind of thing.
That's the kind of mean girl thing that I hear a lot about anecdotally.
And I think that's real.
Well, I was just thinking, it's really, I thought a bit about how so much of the system has broken down over time as marriage rates have declined, as like courtship periods have extended.
Because I remember another thing that went viral a few months ago was just talking about people dating back in like the 40s and 50s and like, oh, oh, these people are dating four or five people at a time.
Well, yeah, because they actually are just going on dates with them.
They're not having these extended relationships.
That's why going steady became a thing.
Exactly.
And it was like the defining the relationship moment.
I want to go steady with you.
Right.
And then it was usually a brief thing.
I think about one thing I wonder about is, is there damage that's done, for example, just it seems much more the norm, even in Christian communities, to just be in a unmarried, unengaged relationship for one year, two years, three years, then you get engaged for a year and a half, and then you actually pull the trigger.
And it's just, no one was doing that back when we actually had thriving families and a 2% divorce rate.
Yeah.
And, you know, I haven't looked deeply into this story, but one of the other interesting developments a couple of weeks ago was Pastor Josh Howerton like challenging these shacking up or, you know, let's say promiscuous couples who are having sex and not married.
He directly said, you're in sin and you need to get this right.
So, you know, here's how we do this.
Let's get married.
Let's have a big, I'm going to let you guys know in a couple of weeks, a month.
I can't remember how we got.
We're going to do that.
Yeah, they had a huge multi-marriage ceremony.
Yeah, where a whole bunch of young people in his church got married.
Polygamy, one-to-one.
Yeah, yeah.
But they have been either living together or having sex before marriage.
And he's like, you got to correct this.
No, it's great.
I'm all for it, by the way.
I think we make way too much of marriage.
It costs way too much.
It's too much of a hurdle.
Just go like have a potluck.
Put on a dress, wear a suit.
Make it happen.
One of the most successful families I know is a guy.
He's about my age, and he got married at the Jefferson Memorial.
It cost him about like $400.
And then he had a dinner with his friends in the common area of their apartment building.
It costs him about $400.
They own a house.
They have four kids.
They live in D.C.
I totally agree.
And everybody wants to like one-up the other people and have their wedding be more beautiful.
I think there's beauty in the way they used to do it in like the 70s and 80s.
I see like my parents, their wedding was like in the backyard of my grandma's house.
Right.
And it was just simple.
Anyways, last question here, and then we got to do the hot swap with Molly and Sean.
So Matt Walsh has come out and said, my biggest issue with this is that like we need to stop celebrating our formerly sinful ways because you're giving this permission structure to your kids to then go, oh, they survived.
It's going to be fine.
I actually totally agree with that.
I had a pastor that said, I want less impressive testimonies.
I want a bunch of like, I was born, I met Jesus, I served Jesus, I lived well and righteously, got married, had kids, had those kids, you know what I mean?
Right.
But like in churches, evangelical churches are the worst of this.
They're like, I was a drug dealer for the cartel, and then I was shooting up heroin, and then Jesus came to me, and it's like, okay, that's that's great, but like, we like, hopefully, we have boring testimonies, right?
And I think there's two things there.
One, um, we need to celebrate boring testimonies.
Yeah.
In fact, I once heard this woman give this great testimony where she said, I was saved from heroin, I was saved from prostitution.
I was saying, and she did this whole list.
That's jail.
No, no, no.
Then at the end, she goes, I was saved by all that because I became a Christian as a child and I never did any of those things.
So the Lord saved me from doing any of that.
I never had to experience any of it.
I love that.
And I thought that was a great testimony.
So do you share your formerly sinful ways with your kids?
Is the question?
I do judiciously because I do think, you know, okay, I am someone with a somewhat colorful testimony.
You're breaking all the rules I just laid out.
I know.
I'm sorry.
But it is a question of wisdom.
I think, you know, are you glorifying your sin for your kids?
Are you a little bit like, oh, that was such a good time?
But yeah, I totally, I regret it.
I'm not going to do that again.
Or are you saying, like, I'm not going to, you know, delve into juicy details and specifics, but here are some poor choices I made in my youth generally.
And here is what it cost me.
And be real and honest about the cost.
So, you know, those are two different pieces.
Because look, I mean, when we look at Paul and like Acts, he's pretty out there about here's, you know, I was chasing Christians to persecute them.
Killing them.
Yeah, I was chasing them to foreign cities.
He's not really shy and retiring about what he was doing.
I'm not talking about his heroin usage and his promise cues.
But is that worse?
I mean, he was trying to murder Christians.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I think you said it really well.
Mark Wayne Heroin Claims00:15:53
I think it's a good place to wrap it.
Megan Basham, you rock.
We love having you in studio.
That's so good to be here.
I've never been in studio on this.
Thank you very much.
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Now we have Sean Davis and Molly Hemingway of the Federalist, a publication I check every day.
And you guys have an event here in town, and so we get the glory of your presence, which not to be related to Jesus because you're not Jesus.
But you're not.
You're pretty great.
You're pretty great.
Thank you guys for coming.
It's wonderful to be here with you.
Yeah, it's the second time we've had you.
They said they're ready to talk about everything.
Literally, literally.
So, what do you guys think of the new Lord of the Rings movie that they're going to make?
Why?
Why?
Yeah, I'm very traumatized.
Why does there need to be a lot of people?
Yeah, they're going to have Stephen Colbert write a Lord of the Rings movie about Sam's daughter.
We'll talk about it today.
And even in the trailer or in the announcement of it, they were getting basic facts wrong about it, which did not inspire trust.
Yes.
Is there Jackson involved?
I hope not.
They claimed that Frodo died.
No, he didn't.
Actually, doesn't he die?
I think no, he just goes to the Undying Lands with the elves.
Yeah, but I think the implication is he still dies there.
Like, he doesn't become immortal.
He doesn't reject the vitars.
I don't imply anything from Tolkien.
If Tolkien doesn't say he's dead, he's not dead.
So you say Tolkien.
Tolkien?
Yeah, I say Tolkien.
Tolkayan.
Either way.
Tolkien.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that.
I'm just going to say there's also an issue with Stephen Colbert there.
Stephen Colbert is, you know, someone who has been funny in his past, but is not, has lost his show because of his hyper-partisanship.
He just runs a Democrat PAC at night.
Yeah.
And he lost his show, and yet now he gets to write something.
He's like, hey, he's like Lord of the Rings.
It just really speaks to the power that the left has over many institutions.
It also speaks to just how absolutely awful late night has, or Hollywood has become that they're using a washed-up late night host who, like, there's got to be better options than Stephen Colbert, is what I'm saying.
A few hundred.
He's not even really a writer.
I'm sure he wrote, I'm sure he's written bits, but the idea that he's going to magically write a screenplay on one of the most celebrated works of fiction in all of history is, it's absurd.
Now I have to get this Jimmy Kimmel clip because you guys have now inspired it with Stephen Colbert, where he's attacking Mark Wayne Mullen for being a plumber.
Mario's a plumber.
And Mike Lee called him an elitist bastard.
And I thought that was wonderful.
And I think you could use even more colorful language.
Mike Lee's a Mormon.
That's about as far as he's going to go.
That's pretty strong for Mike Lee.
But I completely agree.
Jimmy Kimmel, remind you, is the guy that almost lost his show, should have lost his show when he tried to blame Charlie's assassination on MAGA.
And so I went after him, and it was like this Colvette versus Kimmel thing, like for like three days.
And I just can't stand the guy.
There's something about Jimmy Kimmel that makes my skin crawl.
I think he's a rudderless, moralless, absolute, disgusting, vile creature.
Well, here's what I don't get about him attacking Mullen.
Jimmy Kimmel got his start in media with Adam Carolla.
He has Adam Carolla to thank for being a big name.
Adam Carolla was like a carpenter and a general contractor.
Yeah.
That's a great point.
Did you tweet that?
No, I should.
Yeah, in the break.
Like, he's one of Kimmel's best friends.
The reason anyone cares about him, because Carollo's clearly the funnier one of the two, who still to this day, like, I think does construction stuff for fun, and then you're mocking a tradesman.
I just, I don't.
I don't get it.
Well, he's a disgusting pile of garbage, is why there's nothing to get.
And then he had the gall to claim he was a victim.
The big crime there with him is that he's just never funny.
No.
It's mean and angry.
Yeah, and then cries when he, he, you know, people, he, he likes to play this victim.
He was sharing made-up information for political gain.
He was lying for political gain, which is why he suffered for what he was saying there.
And think about what it, the message it sent.
It's a, you can go shoot a conservative and the entire liberal media apparatus is going to rally to your defense and whitewash it and make it go away.
That is a green light for other people to do it as well.
And blame some of the primary victims.
Yes.
Which is just disgusting, reprehensible stuff.
But I just, in general, the Democrat Party, of which Jimmy Kimmel is a major player, they are, what is it, like 40 points underwater with men right now?
No normal man feels good about the Democrat Party.
And then they're going out there and saying, if you are a plumber or a carpenter, you're reprehensible.
You have no business having any say in the running of our country.
And you wonder why they have these problems.
Well, let's go ahead and play the clip then, just since we brought it up.
Sot 26.
Don't worry, Trump's got a whole new generation of thinkers lined up, including his newly confirmed Secretary of Homeland Security, Mark Wayne, Chuck Mike, Bruce Dave Mullen.
Maybe Mellon's better.
He is the now former senator of Oklahoma.
Before he was elected to the Senate, Mark Wayne Mullen was a low-level MMA fighter and a plumber.
That's right.
We have a plumber protecting us from terrorism now.
I work for Super Mario.
Why not Mark Wayne?
I'm not reading.
He owned eight separate businesses.
He turned it into a multi-million dollar business.
It was a six-man crew that he took over from his dad and he turned it into this enormous company.
What is a clown?
Jimmy Kimmel is a clown.
What is a clown doing?
Like a literal court jester for the regime?
What is he doing mocking someone else's occupational choice?
Also, if we're going to make jokes about Mark Wayne Mullen, he sounds like, I don't know, a receiver for Florida with a Q in his name.
Maybe there's an apostrophe in there.
Like, there's your obvious joke, Mark Wayne, but no, you're going to make fun of him for being a plumber?
Mark Wayne.
I do want to say that this, speaking of him being a former Oklahoma senator, does remind me of a big pet peeve I have with the Republican Party, which is in a state like Maine, where a Republican has no shot of winning, you get someone like Susan Collins, who's actually remarkably great for the state of Maine.
She's always there when we need her.
In a state like Oklahoma, which bleeds red, you get these really limp, disappointing senators who in no way are doing what they, you know, you can tolerate a Susan Collins if you have someone who's actually worthy, you know, in Oklahoma to push the agenda in ways that are, that they can do because they're so safe.
And I do not feel great about the current senators out of Oklahoma.
Oklahoma gave us Tom Coburn.
How is it that the reddest state in the country, I don't think a single county in Oklahoma has voted for a dam in multiple elections, why are they giving us squishy?
Well, this is my problem with Texas, that even Cornyn's on the table to be endorsed is beyond me.
I mean, Texas should absolutely have some of our best senators, right?
And that's why we've, I mean, we've endorsed Paxon.
I've had him on the show.
I thought that was a brilliant move.
He said I'd drop out if Cornyn, if they passed the Save Act or they make a deal to get it done, Save America Act.
I thought that was a smart chess move.
And Trump's kind of taking a step back.
I think he kind of read the tea leaves, read the room a little bit, and we'll see how that plays out.
There was a huge information operation right after that primary.
Cornyn should have, with the amount of money he spent, with his name recognition, with being an incumbent, he should have cleaned up in that primary.
And he did not.
He went to a runoff, and there was this info op in D.C. to say, oh, he won, you know, because he had more than all of the other contenders.
He performed so horribly.
And you're seeing now that Trump does not seem like inclined to endorse him given.
The guy's been a backstabber.
I mean, you got to get these guys out.
I mean, listen, if you can get Lindsey Graham out in South Carolina, if you can get Nate Morris in Kentucky, if you can get a Paxton in Texas, already that would be a huge upgrade in multiple places.
The ones that frustrated me are like, okay, we got rid of Romney in Utah and we got replaced with Curtis.
How do you perform more poorly than Romney?
I really want folks to understand this.
Just a quick shout out to you guys.
And I know Charlie appreciated it as well because we said it privately a bunch as we were building the show and thinking through our show flow.
You know, you can't measure the impact of the work that you guys do just on how many page visits you get.
And I hope people understand that because it would be shows like ours and when Charlie was here where you guys formed so much of the intellectual groundwork and foundational thought work that went into then doing it on the show and the podcast and then millions more would see it.
And so I just, you know, you guys do really, really important work and we just totally respect you guys.
And you've been doing it for so long and doing it the right way.
And I hope people really understand that about you guys.
I really appreciate that.
And Sean and I were talking actually just this morning about the important difference between mere punditry and actual investigative reporting.
Anyone can give their opinion about anything.
If you actually want to change the situation on the ground, knowing the facts, being able to put them together in a sensible way, and also just having a different perspective than everybody else in corporate media.
Of course.
You know, they're always trying to push an establishment talking point.
Even if you take this week in the discussions on the SAVE Act, everyone in D.C. is trying to say, oh, they're going to get this SAVE Act done through reconciliation.
Through our reporting with actual facts, we're showing how that's actually not going to happen and how that's a cop-out.
And, you know, it's one thing to just say it.
It's another thing to show procedurally why that's.
Yeah, I mean, it's amazing how much power the parliamentarian has.
You know, it's like you can't, you, there's, they tried, right, during the BBB, like the, at some point that was floated and they were like, you can't get it through.
So they stripped it.
Reconciliation is a weird thing because so much of the rules around it are statutory.
You know, so most Senate procedure and parliamentary stuff is just based on internal rules and precedents.
Budget stuff and reconciliation stuff are one of the rare areas where they've actually put these restrictions on what the Senate can do in it into law.
If you go back and read the debate at the time, there are a lot of people who thought that was a really bad idea.
Like, you can't be putting Senate procedure into law.
Like, that's weird.
And I will actually go to bat for the parliamentarian on this one.
You know, you'll have people say, oh, well, she was appointed by Reed.
She's a Democrat.
I've known her for a long time, worked with her when I worked for Tom Coburn.
And she's a total straight shooter.
And when it comes to things like reconciliation, because the rules are in law, she has very little room to maneuver.
The law says what it says.
The rules are what they are.
And it's up to the Senate at some point to actually take some responsibility and determine whether it's going to allow this stuff or not.
So then I got to put you guys, got to ask the tough question then.
Abolish the filibuster, nuke it.
What are we going to do here?
Talking filibuster?
What should be the next step?
I would just say you do not need to destroy the filibuster in order to continue to push the SAVE Act through the Senate.
The filibuster is an important thing for minority rights.
And frequently, people on the right, and conservatives, are going to be in the minority.
Taking away all minority rights from the Senate, which is supposed to be this great deliberative body, is not a great idea.
I think what is a wiser course of action is to let the Senate actually be the Senate, discuss, debate.
Even just when they did a little bit of debate on the SAVE Act, you saw Democrats say, oh, well, actually, we don't oppose voter ID.
That's not true.
But they said it publicly.
Well, if you can take that little morsel and say, okay, what if we just take away everything else in the SAVE Act, but all we care about is voter ID?
It shows that you have room to negotiate and be that deliberative body that it was for hundreds of years before people started just taking all the debate out and putting it into back rooms.
I genuinely wish we could get rid of, actually kind of get rid of C-SPAN, because I think C-SPAN messed up Congress where every speech, if you've ever been inside the chambers, you know that the speeches they give are fake.
They're delivered to nobody except a few bored bystanders who are yawning.
They're all just so they can be on C-SPAN, be on the record for whatever clip they want to get.
So there's it's baffling.
It's almost, it's very alien to read about the U.S. Congress 150 years ago, where guys can become major American figures because they are, you know, giants of actual argument on the floor of the House, on the floor of the Senate.
They get things through on the basis of that.
And that's been totally wiped out in favor of just endless procedural nonsense.
On the filibuster specifically, though, I think I actually might disagree there on it being about minority rights.
I think a good formulation from a friend of mine, Vince Collins, actually, I think you know him.
He pointed out the filibuster, it protects not the minority, it protects the majority from votes it secretly does not want to take.
Because that is how we have all these Republicans who say, I'm super MAGA, I'm super gung-ho on the border.
Oh, but, you know, it can't pass this.
You need 60 votes.
And same thing when the Democrats have power.
Oh, yeah, we know we'd love to do all that, you know, crazy socialism, abolish the police stuff, but, you know, 60 votes, guys, tough breaks.
And I feel like that is how it has broken out.
And we have this fake Senate, a fake Senate that never passes anything.
I think that's totally true.
I think that's less a function of the filibuster than the modern running of the Senate.
I personally think Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell together destroy the U.S. Senate.
Rather than allowing debate to flower and to be unpredictable, they would go in, they put a bill on the floor, they would do what's called fill the tree.
So they make it impossible for anyone to offer amendments and they'd file closure.
And then you would just vote on that, and that was the end of it.
If you could convince me that if we've abolished the filibuster tomorrow, that we had 51 votes to do truly transformational things to restore the country, I think I would be all for it.
The reality is that if we were to abolish the filibuster today, they would have 51 votes to reopen DHS, and that is it.
Destroying The U.S Senate00:16:39
That is the only thing the Republicans would get.
You don't think we get Save America Act passed?
You don't think we get end invasion-level migration?
You don't think we could do that?
No, and I actually think that's why Thune and leadership were so against the talking filibuster.
They came up with procedural reasons why they said it couldn't work, which were all fake.
The reality is they didn't have 50 votes to do what they wanted to push it through.
That's depressing.
That means we need way better Republicans.
Absolutely.
Yep.
Primaries are where the battle is for Republican.
To your point, though, rather than blackpilling over this, it is true that by and large, every two years you get a slightly better class of Republican senators.
You compare who've come in more recently with people who came in during Schmidt, Subberville.
Yeah, real leadership coming in there.
Holly's been kind of interesting, actually.
He's been more and more kind of an X factor.
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Caboose, you're getting shout outs by our guests here on your musical choices.
The bumpers are fire.
They approve.
He says, thank you very much.
You can't go wrong with free.
Play never surrender for the next one.
That's my favorite.
Blake is definitely more engaged with the musical choices.
I'm just like.
Sometimes we'll get a new one I haven't heard before, and I'll just have to ask what it is because I don't know all of my 90s alt rock that they throw at us with some bowling for soup songs I've ever heard of.
So I went to this show in Scottsdale a couple weeks back and I actually saw the Gin Blossoms.
And I was like, I was like, guys, I saw the Gym Blossoms.
And I was too young when they were big, but you keep hearing their songs for years afterwards.
And so they're, I mean, I know the words, you know?
And everybody in the studio is like, who's the gym blossom?
The gold era.
I've never heard of any of these things.
The gym blossoms are legit.
It's the pride of 10 P. Like, that's why I thought everybody would know about it.
We've got Hey Jealousy.
Yes.
Swallow You Down.
Oh, dude, Gin Blossoms are never hearing.
They're amazing.
By the way, the guy, you know, he's, you know, I think he's like an old Xer or whatever.
And his voice sounds perfect.
So it just sounds the exact same.
We need to bring that 90s guitar rock.
I totally agree.
But we're a dying breed.
I know.
It's really sad.
Blake doesn't even understand what we're talking about.
Music died when Nevermind came out.
Okay, so speaking of big, big views like that, Sean showed me this really interesting YouTube on how everybody came to hate Nickelback and how unnatural that was.
Caboose loves Nickelback.
I am 100% pro-Nickelback.
Caboose loves Nickelback.
I am not.
They're Canadian.
Get them out.
It kind of went through how it started as a, like, literally a joke on Comedy Central that got pulled and played over and over again.
And also how critics never liked them because they were so focused on commercial success.
And so, but they kept on selling like just gangbusters.
They weren't gangbusters.
And the more successful they were, the worse their critical reviews were.
And then it became like a joke.
And then it became this joke that you like had to believe in.
And it was just like this fascinating.
Yeah, Blake, you were psyoped into not liking Nickelback.
I'm not going to show why you're not.
I'm pretty sure I organically do not like Nickelback.
Yeah, I also am not a Nickelback fan, but I still like Nickelback.
How do you remind me?
No.
1.8 billion streams on Spotify.
Those are just the same.
And we know that the people are never wrong.
Yeah.
I knew he'd have it on call because he's like, Caboose is like the biggest Nickelback stand there is.
And I'm always like, Nickelback.
Like, why is that?
Because, you know, and Pozo loves Creed, and so there's been a lot of Creed talk.
And I kind of lumped them together in the same thing.
But Creed was, obviously, had the faith angle that was much more pronounced, if you will.
I mean, music is an interesting question.
I mean, we had the All-American Halftime show, which did like between 50 and 60 million viewers.
We actually hired an independent media analyst to break down the numbers and give us like a Nielsen equivalent.
And it was the, if you add up all the streams together, it was the number one live stream event in basically online history.
But we all did that with like two months prep.
Yeah, and I mean, honestly, we put in like most of the work in the last two weeks, but it was, you know, and if you, we can't claim that it was the number one because we didn't put everything into one account.
So Turning Points YouTube account, though, was the second largest in world history and the number one in U.S. history.
Not bad, right?
It's amazing.
And it also shows that the worse that the NFL is doing with its halftime show, the more opportunity there is there.
I'm curious to see if they're going to pivot, you know, and try and do something a little bit more uniting.
Here's the problem is that they've got a Super Bowl in Nashville in like, what, two years, three years?
So I don't think they're going to go country next year because they're sort of holding that back for whatever.
I think it's 2020.
They should just do a Metallica halftime show.
That would be small.
That would be awesome.
They should have done that last year.
In San Francisco, it was like, you have the perfect act right there.
Like, that's the move.
You do have a problem with not enough monoculture of people being able to all know the same band.
Like, it's true that this guy who did the Super Bowl is very popular in a certain niche, but not with the rest of the people.
What if they did it?
Okay, okay.
It's total swerve.
What if they did a K-pop Super Bowl halftime show?
BTS halftime show.
It's your worst idea ever.
I think it would be pretty funny.
I think it'd be a funny show.
That would be less controversial than Bad Bun.
The music video would kill.
I just want to say, I was listening to the Dana Carvey, who's that guy?
David Spade.
David Spade podcast.
Oh, yeah.
And they were actually talking about the TPUSA halftime show.
One of the things they mentioned was that.
We got mentioned at the Oscars.
Yeah.
Oh, I love it.
And they were mentioning, though, that the first people to have done an alternate halftime was it was In Living Color.
Yes.
And how successful that had been.
And that's why we got the halftime show.
Like, they kind of did more lame halftime shows.
And then, because no one's going to counterprogram the Super Bowl.
And then the other networks are like, screw it.
We're going to counterprogram the Super Bowl.
And then the next year they rolled out Michael Jackson.
By the way, it was so hard to do.
You would not believe how many people were like, I'm in.
Let's do this.
Can't wait.
And then their manager or their agent would call and be like, you can't do that.
But yeah, music is powerful.
But let's talk about culture in general.
It feels like we had this moment in 2024 where we were culturally ascendant, right?
You saw the New Yorker magazine with all the young kids at the inauguration.
It was this dawn of a new era.
Really hasn't materialized.
I think losing Charlie was a big blow to that.
But I also think just some of this, the Epstein stuff and the Iran stuff, I feel like, you know, we've got CPAC going on, by the way, in Texas.
So the conservative movement is coalescing, at least in some shape or form, in that sense.
But what do you guys make of this?
Like, did we lose the plot?
Is it policy?
Is it just this is a hard country to govern and this was inevitable?
What do you guys make of that?
I think a big part of the energy coming out of 2024 was the outsider energy.
When you're on the outside looking in, which Trump was, they tried to kill him, they tried to imprison him, they tried to bankrupt him, and then he's ascendant and comes back.
America loves an underdog.
That's a great story.
The vibe and the energy was awesome.
But then when you get into power, that all changes.
You don't have that outsider energy anymore.
I feel like that's the real struggle now, is now you're in there and you actually have to do stuff and what's actually being done.
It's a lot harder.
But yeah, there's been a definite vibe switch.
And speaking of difficulties, building coalitions, that's a very difficult thing to do and to maintain.
You know, just being here in this studio reminds me that after Charlie was assassinated, people tried to say, oh, well, this is a big free speech martyr.
Well, he was a free speech martyr, but he was so, so much more than that.
It was not just about advocating for free speech, but the content of what he was talking about was much more important.
But also just his role within the movement was as this statesman who was able to interact with all these different groups of people with sometimes competing interests and keep everybody from going crazy.
And you don't really have a lot of figures who can serve that function.
And also just politically speaking, Donald Trump has historically been really good at managing his coalition.
And I think less good in recent months than he has been in the world.
Some of this is inevitable.
Some of this is inevitable.
I think I've pointed this out.
There's a lot of stuff about President Trump that is, I think for a lot of people, it's very endearing and funny when he's this candidate.
You know, he's always saying funny stuff.
He says something that sends the media into an absolute frenzy and all of that.
And it's very entertaining while he's running.
He's always doing unpredictable stuff.
And I do think for a chunk of the population, it just becomes less amusing when he's the president of the United States.
Like, he can post on truth whatever he wants when he's running.
But don't you think he's done so much less of that this term than he does?
I think it's less prominent because he's not on, he's, you know, he's on Truth Social instead of on X.
But I do think that stands out.
And I just think there's going to be a core of people where, you know, he says something about Rob Reiner on Truth.
It goes really viral that he said that.
And a lot of people, even if they like his policies, they just, they don't like that.
I'm not in Ubers as much as I was when I was in D.C., but I do remember taking Ubers in D.C.
And a super common take I would run into from these guys who are immigrant cab drivers.
And they would say, oh, I love Donald Trump's policies, but I do not wish he would tweet so much.
Well, hopefully they're not voting.
if they have an accent like that anyways i did love see the the moment where i felt like the energy was coming back was the pearl harbor comment in That was great.
That was great.
That's the Trump I want to see more of.
Well, you know what's crazy is we had, you know, I talked with Rich Barris, who's polling a lot, and he's kind of like Black Pill Barris right now.
And, you know, I asked him after the State of the Union, you know, do you think he's going to get a bump from that?
Like, that felt really good.
He was like, yeah, he's going to get a serious bump from that.
And Rich was sounding a really positive note.
And then like a week later, Iran happens, right?
And I instantly knew that that was going to be wildly unpopular with young people.
There's no doubt about it.
I know like some of us that have been pushing this anti-interventionist foreign policy for years.
And by the way, Trump helped usher that in when he called, you know, Iraq a dumb war, right?
I mean, he is the sort of originator of this energy, and it was extremely popular, especially with young people.
And that was always Charlie's focus is my focus.
I'm going like, okay, this might be the natural security right play, but it's going to be politically very dubious.
As a side note, I'm surprised President Trump's shaken up so many other traditions in politics.
If you get a bump from the State of the Union, I'm surprised Trump has never made the call.
I'm going to do the State of the Union the last week of October.
Oh, that's interesting.
He doesn't say when you have to do it.
It has to be Trump.
It says it has to be once a year.
There was polling yesterday from Fox News showing pretty bad numbers for Trump in terms of his approval ratings.
And there's just a lot of polling showing just general lack of support for this war.
But you think about all the polling that we heard about for the last couple of weeks.
What was it?
100% of Trump supporters support Trump.
It was like 100%.
Kind of a weird MAGA.
It's tautological.
Yeah, but like if MAGA is shrinking, then 100% of a smaller political thing.
They were saying, though, MAGA is not shrinking and it's 100% support.
Whenever you hear 100% number, you should be suspicious, right?
Like it doesn't sound real.
I would say, well, I think that's what it is.
I just think there is a hard core of Trump supporters where, I mean, President Trump himself has said, I am MAGA.
MAGA is me.
Like, there's just a group of people who have decided I will support President Trump kind of no matter what he does.
I think he's won me over.
But if that number is 35% or whatever it was from the Fox poll, how are you going to win elections?
That's the thing.
And so that's what I wish more people were thinking about in D.C. Obviously, in D.C., the main push is make sure Donald Trump does not pull out of this war.
Make sure he stays in.
You see this in the Wall Street Journal editorials.
They're like, you would be the biggest loser in history if you didn't commit to ground invasion.
I think the Wall Street Journal had a take that if we don't commit ground troops, the United States will collapse.
It's investing a lot of importance.
What's going on with the Wall Street Journal?
You guys probably know more about that than I do.
But the neocon element, I've heard it described, I think it was Kurt Mills or something, said that this is like the Empire Strikes Back of the Neocons.
And I mean, I'm curious about your take.
So, okay, let's say you've got the 82nd Airborne getting in position.
You've got Marines.
You've got some other paratroopers.
All the pieces are in place for some sort of potential ground strike.
And President Trump, in recent memory, when he builds up a force, he uses it.
Okay, so let's say this happens.
What is the political implication of that?
And does it depend on the outcome?
I guess it necessarily does.
I mean, eventually it depends on the outcome, but how far away is the outcome?
And wars have this tricky thing.
And it feels a little bit like people got a false sense of confidence from this Venezuela race.
It was super easy.
We went and kidnapped Nick Cage or kidnapped Maduro for Nick Cage in a constitution movement.
Which was objectively rash.
An amazing operation.
President Trump clearly, he likes to be able to do stuff quickly, instantaneously.
That has a lot of appeal to him.
I think, I mean, even on domestic policy, he wants to issue executive orders.
One reason I think he loves tariffs, he does innately like tariffs, but he also loves that he can impose them by executive fiat a lot of the time.
And whenever he's trying to demand the SAVE Act, it's okay, suddenly it's mired in, oh, the Senate has a filibuster and they don't want to, and they're moving slow and it's a bummer.
I think he likes with foreign policy that he does have this huge range of action.
I think people who, frankly, have always been in the pro-war caucus, they won him over with, oh, this Fordo thing, big instant success.
This Venezuela thing, big instant success.
I think it's pretty clear they sold him a narrative that Iran would be similar.
I think they pretty clearly expected that they would blow up the Ayatollah and they would instantly either surrender or collapse.
And that didn't happen.
And now I am a little concerned that now they're selling him, it's going to be easy.
You just send in these Marines, you take this island, then they'll have to surrender.
And if that doesn't happen, what are they going to tell him then?
And that's the nature of war, and it's why you should always be super hesitant.
The enemy always gets a vote.
You may decide when it starts, but they generally decide when it ends.
And right now, they don't seem like they're in a hurry to end it right now.
So are we going to be talking about this in July or October or next year?
I just read a book about World War II in the Pacific from the Japanese perspective.
And so they have a Japanese ambassador in the United States who, I believe, was not told they were going to do Pearl Harbor.
They didn't inform him of this.
War breaks out.
He's interned for a few months.
Like six months later, they trade him and he goes back to Japan.
And he meets the government and they're like, we wish you to like, you know, make an initiative to like negotiate a peace deal with the United States as quickly as possible.
And he just looks at them and he's like, I don't think you guys quite understand what you have done.
I don't think they're going to make peace with you guys.
And he was correct.
Pearl Harbor Ambush00:11:26
Exactly.
War has a way of having objectives outside of what your own are.
It's easier to start a war than to end it because the enemy gets a vote.
I will say, I saw, again, Wall Street Journal story saying that Trump is privately telling anybody who will listen that he does not want this to drag on, that he wants to be out very soon.
And Byron York had the point that, well, that's also what he's saying publicly.
And he has said publicly over and over and over again.
He's thinking more four to six week timeline.
And so that is why you're seeing the pressure now being to elongate this war and have it continue.
The gas prices alone are politically catastrophic.
Inflation is going to be 5.5% again.
But I do think that, and I'm saying this is totally outside of my own views, communicating more what you want to achieve might be helpful for political outcomes.
Doing more of a, you know, bringing people along with your goals.
I wasn't expecting this, I have to say.
But death of recess, it stopped me in my tracks.
This isn't about dodgeballs and jungle gyms.
It's about control.
The modern American classroom didn't just happen.
It was intentionally designed.
It was standardized and centralized.
And once you see who built it and who protects it, everything clicks.
Billions of dollars are flowing through education bureaucracies every year.
Test scores collapse.
And somehow the answer is always more money and less parental authority.
The documentary breaks down how organizations like the NEA amassed enormous influence, how radical gender ideology entered classrooms and why something as basic as recess, movement, freedom, childhood, you know, had to go.
That's not random.
That's systemic.
Institutions protect themselves.
They do not protect your kids.
And that's why this documentary exists on Angel Studio streaming platform, Angel Guild.
Angel Guild is willing to distribute films that challenge powerful systems when legacy media won't touch them.
So right now, go to angel.com slash Charlie and watch Death of Recess right now.
If you're a parent or plan to be, you need to see this.
That's angel.com slash Charlie and watch Death of Recess.
By the way, yeah, we got some B-roll of the All-American Halftime show.
You know, people love this show, first of all, I will tell you.
And then the haters online have to be like, you know, and I was like, no, we did a pretty darn good job.
There it is.
And Kid Rock, bless him, man.
I mean, he was the one guy that had the guts to stand with us and like anchor that thing.
And it was, so God bless him.
I genuinely, I was never like a huge Kid Rock guy.
And after this, I'm like, the man can do no wrong.
God bless him.
I was on a plane or something during the Super Bowl, and I'm not really a big NFL watcher.
Have you ever played the game to intentionally not know what the score is?
No.
I love it.
I love it.
But I was talking to my sister, my nieces and nephews, and everybody loved the show.
And they were really happy that there was an alternative that they could enjoy.
Good.
And by the way, it was like 30 minutes out and there was already a million people on the stream waiting for it.
I was like, this is something's happening.
Something's like really happening.
All right.
So I have two questions for you.
The first is Joe Kent.
I want to help me understand what do you think the importance of this?
How damaging was this to President Trump, to the war effort?
Or is it, you know, kind of what you learned about Joe Ken has your thinking on it changed?
Yeah, I think it'll end up being a blip in the whole scheme of things.
Washington has a way of making you believe that whatever is happening right now is the most important thing ever.
I mean, it wasn't unimportant, but I think, you know, a month or two from now, it'll be forgotten.
Molly and I were talking on the way to the studio this morning about how there seems to have been a permanent change kind of in how the American mind processes events.
I don't know whether it was COVID that did it or the Russia hoax or the JFK assassination where people just instinctively refuse to believe whatever it is they're told is the primary story.
And a lot of times this can be directionally accurate.
You can kind of smell a rat.
You know that something's not right.
And then you go to look for, you know, what might have explained this behavior that has better facts.
You know, did COVID come from a lab or not?
We were told, oh, no, no, it was natural.
It was from wet markets.
And everyone kind of knew, no, no, no, it came from a lab.
So I think there's a healthy instinct that people have to question the narrative, but there can be a point where that goes way too far.
And I think what we're seeing now with just how easy it is to go and research stuff on the internet, there's podcasts everywhere.
It's really easy to kind of choose your own adventure when it comes to a narrative.
And that can, like I said, it can be a good instinct, but it can really go too far to where you just refuse to accept anything you ever hear ever, in which case you're really just crafting your own reality.
It's not isolated to the left.
It happens on the right as well.
And I think overall, it's kind of an unhealthy thing to do when we can never agree on the nature of reality or facts or anything ever.
There's got to be a way back from that.
And more specifically on the individual in question, I do think that Sean refers to staffer syndrome where staffers think they're much more important than they are.
If you believe you cannot support your principle and you feel that you should resign, I think you should resign.
I think that's more honorable than staying in and undermining and sabotaging, leaking.
I don't like that behavior.
You should do it quietly.
You should not do it where you are the center of the story.
And so I don't really like the way that all went down.
Now, I will say, I do think debate is good.
Debate on this war is good.
And nobody should be afraid of it.
The strongest supporters of this war should understand that debating the objectives, the means by which you're going to obtain those objectives, is healthy and important.
Wars are not done unilaterally.
You have to have the support of the people who are putting their lives on the line, who are paying for it, and who might be forced to pay for it.
For, you know, in the case of previous wars we've done, sometimes that lasts for decades.
And so there are, see, I didn't love like everything about the way this went down.
And I think we should just encourage much better debate.
So I find it interesting that, you know, we're plus six months from Charlie's assassination, and it still feels like this is the churn that we're in, even in the midst of a war.
And sort of the question is, you know, can we bring this back together in time for the midterms?
Can we bring the coalition back, a winning coalition, so that we don't get completely shellacked?
And if so, what needs to happen between now and then?
Yeah, we absolutely can.
I'm not a black pillar at all.
Six months in politics is an eternity.
We have extremely short memories as American voters.
I would compare them to goldfish generally.
I remember in 91, George H.W. Bush had at one point a 91% approval rating on the heels of Desert Storm.
Ends up getting 40% in the election over a year and a half.
Well, that was Ross Perot had something to do with that too, but yes.
So did raising taxes and violating that key pledge.
You know, we go back to 2020.
I was at the State of the Union.
Trump blew the roof off that building.
I think it was better than the State of the Union speech he gave this year.
The economy was roaring, and then bam, COVID hits, everything falls apart.
So six months is an eternity.
What do we have to do to get where we need to be?
I think Trump needs to have a laser focus on the domestic economy.
He needs to understand that you have people who went to college and followed the rules who can't get jobs.
You have a whole generation that thinks they're never going to get married.
They're never going to own a home because you look at how much you have to have just to have a down payment, let alone the mortgage interest rate.
And increasingly, you have multiple generations of people who believe the American dream is a total fantasy and totally out of reach.
If he is laser focused on that with solutions on how to deal with how can you afford a house, how do you get college affordable?
Can we make groceries normal, gas affordable?
I think that solves most of his problems.
And I would say, you know, this is Donald Trump is currently the president, but will not be with us forever.
And it is shocking and appalling to me how little other Republicans have thought about being leaders in this moment.
And the political party that does address some of these really deep questions about, you know, what does it mean to be an American?
What does it mean to have a flourishing life will benefit with voters?
Now, I also think there's something incumbent upon the people themselves.
One of the things I love about particularly Charlie's last few years was his emphasis less on politics and more on inculcating morals in the people, focusing on the importance of religion.
And I think that even as Sean and I are doing day-to-day news, you guys are doing a daily radio show, like we have to be focused on the day-to-day, but we also need to be focused on much bigger long-term issues about the trust we put in princes and whether we are a moral people capable of having this constitutional government.
And if I can just make a little pitch here, I have a book coming out next month on Justice Alito, who is, I think, our most important and least understood justice.
And one of the things I try to point out in this book is how he balances pragmatism and principle.
And too often on the right, we have seen people really just go at one extreme or the other.
And it doesn't work if you do that.
You can be, you know, you can ride your principle and not care at all about whether you're helping the people that those principles are supposedly supposed to help.
Or you can be so pragmatic that you become a utilitarian and think the ends justify the means.
And so we as a people need to understand how to balance those things and also hold up those people, less influencers, more people who show moral courage, like I would say, Justice Alito.
I'm Charlie Kirk.
And Blake, final, I think you should take us home here.
That Mamdani versus MAGA, that divide the future.
I mean, you have to recognize, like, people set, people still, I think they get lost in the idea that we won this like huge permanent victory in 2024.
They're not really accounting to reality, which is this can swerve back very violently.
There's very radical people who would love to abolish a lot of core American freedoms, would love to bring a revive 2020 style social revolution.
They already have ruined entire states.
They would love to ruin the entire country.
And that is what we are facing if we cannot adapt to the stresses that young people are facing, because they will vote to blow stuff up.
Some of them will vote to blow stuff up just because it gives them a rush to do it.
So you have to win over the people who are at least inclined to keep things together.
Yeah.
And that was one of Charlie's final warnings to us.
You know, we're a race against the clock to train the next generation to value the same things that our founders gave us.
Molly Hemingway, Sean Davis, you guys are amazing.
We do it.
It's nice to be here.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.