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March 21, 2024 - On Brand
02:50:20
OB #48 - Charlie Kirk

In an unexpected booking, none other than Turning Points founder and CEO Charlie Kirk came on Russell's show. This is bad. Charlie Kirk is, to put it gently, a problem. But how does Russell respond to him? Support us on Patreon! - patreon.com/OnBrand Buy a magnet! - lookattheshinyshinygold

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Time Text
This is propaganda live.
I only suggest how she's taken out a vote.
Extraordinary cultural moment.
Already iconic.
Already iconic.
We love you.
You're welcome here.
Where did this guy come from?
It looks like he's been doing it for ages.
He's very confident.
Plainly, and this is a matter now of fact and record, I'm right wing.
I feel that Christ may have had a better vision.
Is this misinformation or is Vivek Ramaswamy in the lavatory?
That's sort of like a poem.
Is this Eminem?
Man, if we didn't come together in that stream, I'm assuming it was just the Pete.
Now these are the kind of conversations I think that the legacy media can no longer compete with.
Win win win win win win win This is On Brand, a podcast where we discuss the ideas and antics of, one, Russell Brand.
I'm Al Worth, and each week I go through an episode of Brand Show with my co-host Lauren B. That's me!
And I am entirely in the dark about what we are going to cover today, but we've got a trend going that it's usually kind of bad.
Almost invariably bad, which is why we do the good thing before the bad thing.
Lauren, what is your good thing this week?
McCluskey!
Oh yeah!
Was Friday and, uh, what a pander to us 40 year olds.
Wow!
I got, it was Muppet Christmas Carol level pandering to exactly what my stupid little nostalgia brain wanted.
Oh, it was great.
It was very cool.
And it was like a lot of stuff, you know, I say a lot of songs that I never thought I was going to get to hear, um, because I, Discovered McCluskey after they split up.
Disbanded.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Granted, I have gotten to see future left quite a bit, which.
Asterisk because all my, like, especially if they were in St.
Louis, all my friends knew that I was excited about it, that we're at the show and by me shot.
So I still have never remembered the end of a future of the left concert.
I don't, I never do that.
Like that's, I don't, cause I like listening to the music at a show and then like remembering everything.
And so I very rarely even like get saucy let alone oh no and so I actually was present for the entire.
The length of the performance and it was awesome.
And it was just like, I mean, I was remembering, I was like, wait a second, a lot of my friends and, you know, bands I've listened to, like, man, people cover McCloskey, like a lot.
And, and because it's like a fun thing to throw in there and, and it's kind of a flex, you know?
And so I'm not ever, I was like, Oh yeah, I have actually, I've heard this, but not from them.
And so I, yeah, we got every, I got all the songs.
Like I got everything.
They played the new stuff.
That was great.
It sounded awesome.
And it was just like, it was super fun.
Um, I mean, it wasn't necessarily like.
Also, like, wasn't packed.
I mean, it's a very niche kind of, like, in the grand scheme of things.
They're very much one of those bands where, like, if you know, you know, you know, it's that that kind of that kind of thing.
They do have kind of a cult following, you know, we've spoken about them quite a lot off brand, you know, and I know a couple of their folks, you know, which is fun.
After school, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So the bassist of Future of the Left, who is Andy Falco, the kind of driving force behind McCluskey and Future of the Left.
His wife is Julia Ruzicka, who is the bassist of Future of the Left, who was principal at my university while I was there, which was a bizarre thing to realize when it occurred.
I had no idea until she delivered a presentation about herself and how much she liked Queens of the Stone Age and whatever, and I was like...
Oh!
Okay, this is... minds were blown.
Right.
So yeah, that's... I mean, that's a cool kind of like... it's a funny connection, but yeah.
It was, you know, and we got like a friend of ours is like, you know, anyway, that's a friend of ours is, you know, there and works at the venue.
So like, it's just it's a cool kind of connection.
And it's an old venue.
The Vic is super cool.
And it just was like.
Well, it was perfect.
And it was awesome.
Yeah, it was really fun.
And and yeah, it was it is kind of a they were word of mouth because like I an ex whom still, you know, like tight with and gets like full credit because it was one of these things where I was like, Oh, what is that?
I need as much of it as possible.
And it got to the point where, like, I had all these, like, memories of, like, roller derby.
We would sing, I'm fearful, I'm fearful.
Flying is fearful of me.
We'd, like, scream.
My gal, Shanghai Lily, was her derby name.
We'd, like, scream at each other's faces and do a couple, like, a couple of, you know, helmet bonks.
Makes you feel real.
Excitable, you know?
Get your blood up!
Yeah, yeah.
See, I can be jealous of you on this account, because I've seen Future of the Left many times, I've seen Future of the Left perform McCluskey songs, but I've never actually seen McCluskey.
So, you know, you've got one for me there.
I never had, they didn't perform McCluskey.
That's why I was so, I was like, I wonder what we're going to hear, because they didn't, it was all Future of the Left only, whenever I've seen them.
Awesome.
Awesome.
It was tight.
We got banter.
We got sick banter.
Oh yeah.
Best banter.
Falco's a very, very funny human being.
Hands down.
I made a peep show joke with someone I did not know that was close to me, and we were like, oh, this is the crowd.
I'm like, yeah.
They could probably just put on three episodes of Peep Show right now and we'd be fine.
Absolutely, absolutely.
Just have them on a projector behind the band, you know, and everyone would be into it.
Yeah, like Peep Show, Mr. Show, like that's, yeah, that's like, that would be, that would be, everybody be into it.
Anyway, that's my, it was, it was, it was super tight and I'm wearing my Wearing my McCluskey shirt.
The last one of these, which like, yeah, even their merch was tight.
It was all, they're doing great.
It's weird.
Fantastic.
Yeah.
I'm usually very like, oh, reunions, whatever.
This is different, though.
Yeah, yeah.
It felt a little like unfinished business, so I feel like, you know, it makes perfect sense to me.
That's great.
This doesn't feel like, you know, a cash grab from a bunch of old dudes sitting in recliners.
Yeah, right, yeah.
There's artistic merit behind it.
Yeah, yeah.
There's still juice in the tank, yeah.
Right, so what's your good thing?
My good thing is on a completely different subject.
So as we explored a little bit in the Off-Brand this week, you know, when I sit down with Russell I do, my preference is to kind of deal with it in a big chunk and so I am sat there kind of watching for a while and which often leaves me, you know, kind of a little bit listless sometimes if I get a little bit bored of his content or whatever else.
And so my good thing this week is LEGO!
It's LEGO!
And I unearthed in the move this LEGO set that I got a while ago of London, which is a car.
Viewers can see it.
Yeah, and so while dealing with Russell this week, I built a Lego set of London, and we've got the National Gallery over here, we've got Big Ben, and all that good stuff.
We've got London Bridge, and we've got the London Eye as well.
Um, which is, uh, yeah, that's been, that's been nice.
It's, it's a, it's a calming influence while, while listening to horrible, horrible things.
Uh, so I've heard the guys episode they did on Lego guys was very enlightening though.
While there still can be people that can get very upset about Lego.
It does.
It does.
Um, I mean, shout out to the flub heads.
That was, it's so fun to hear just like, I mean, I feel like it's a much lower bar to entry, like the model train for the dads, like dads everywhere, because model trains are a lot.
They are a lot.
No disrespect to the train people out there, I'm just talking about trains.
Well, I think a lot of respect.
But like, you know, all the respect in the world.
It's very cool, Mike.
Yeah, I've never like, I've never delved into like Warhammer and that kind of thing.
You know, the painting of the models and all that.
I probably would enjoy it.
But again, that feels like a lot to kind of take on.
Whereas, yeah, I've always loved Lego sets.
As a person who has to buy enamel paint.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Also expense.
Yeah.
Exponentially worse!
I'm sticking to my Lego for now.
I've built a couple of pirate ships already in the past.
A couple of big pirate ships which I really like.
I'm happy with my thing of London.
I like their architecture series.
They've got an architecture series that's really cool.
Oh, because yeah, I got way curious because of the episode of guys and they're talking about, you know, legal guys and I was like, I have to see this typewriter.
I have to see what the fuck they're talking about.
So I like poked around on the website quite a bit.
And yeah, there's such cool stuff.
They like, like pretty awesome job.
Like they do.
Like I was tempted a couple I was like all that.
That's not very expensive.
It'll look extremely cool.
It's so fun.
Well, no, I'm not going to, but I appreciate it.
I think it's neat.
Like, no notes.
I mean, pricey.
Yeah, some of it.
Some of it, yeah.
If you can get it secondhand, all the better.
Yeah!
Lord of the Rings one's out, and I'm like, ooh, those are pretty cool.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'll wait and see if I can get them for cheap.
But yeah, that's kept me in a more pleasant kind of place while dealing with... I've already told you, we do have a doozy of a show this week and I needed the Lego.
I'm going to say, I needed the Lego.
Now we have a show to do, but first we should thank some new patrons.
So first up we have The Great Pumpkin.
You are now an awakening wonder.
You are indeed an awakening wonder.
The Great Pumpkin!
I love your work!
Thank you so much!
Thank you.
Big fan.
Absolutely.
And Meredith Martin, you are now an awakening wonder.
You are indeed an awakening wonder.
Thank you, Meredith.
Thank you so much.
Lovely name as well.
I like the name.
Yeah.
And if anyone wants to support us in what we do, become an Awakening Wanderer, join the Invisible Hand, or donate on an elevated tier, head to patreon.com slash OnBrand and you will have our eternal gratitude.
It is this which allows us to be editorially independent and ad-free.
As a patron, you will also get a shout-out on the show and access to our patron-only show OffBrand, where we discuss anything but Russell brand, except this week we did do a fair bit of discussion
around Russell Brand because we had a little behind the scenes content showing how the sausage is
made, or rather how an episode of On Brand is put together before getting into some research
methodology and going through it in real time and also having a bit of a discussion around it,
which was cool. I hope you like it.
Yeah, I had a little more like, I don't know, I felt very analyzy.
I, but like, I, you know, I don't know.
I think, I think it's always just too, too tempting.
And I think it's also important and interesting to see like, where is this guy come where, where are the cracks in the, and we can explore where are the cracks in the, in the foundation for this, these kinds of shows.
Like we can look at kind of, we looked more, I think at the, the way, um, That maybe it's more applicable to, like, all of the content that we're covering.
It's, you know, looking at these patterns and seeing how people manipulate sources, all that kind of stuff.
Which we can't really cover all the time in the show.
How to really kind of get stuck into the research side of it.
And, you know, how to try and do that in an exhaustive fashion.
Because, you know, we ran into, in that episode, the problem where there was just nothing there!
Because, you know, people are making shit up or finding it on forums or whatever else.
Yeah, so that was very interesting and I hope our patrons enjoy.
So, you know, head to patreon.com slash onbrand to check that out.
And please note that while you can easily listen to our audio version anywhere you can find podcasts, you can also watch us on YouTube, or if you listen in the Spotify app, the video will come up there as well.
Now then, in terms of Russell's content this last week, we've had a, you know, slew of editorials affirming the likes of Alex Jones, Elon Musk, and of course, Donald Trump.
But what we're looking at today is once more an interview.
Now, the past couple of weeks we've had bigot Rand Paul and Nazi supporter Mike Benz on the show, which doesn't seem like a great trajectory to be on, and so I did wonder in the back of my mind if we could get yet more ghoulish, and well, to find out, let's let Russell introduce the guest.
Hello there, you Awakening Wonders.
Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
We've got an extraordinary show for you.
The first 15 minutes will be broadly available.
You might be watching it somewhere else.
You're like a peeping Tom, peering over a fence at somebody else's private business.
Because after the first 15, we will be exclusively available in that sweet stream that we know as Rumble.
Why?
Because free speech is our ethos and our edict.
And if you're speaking to Charlie Kirk, You gotta speak freely because I'm asking him why does he believe in Trump?
Have the right taken Trump to task when it comes to subjects like vaccines, Christianity and indeed what Trump's second term would look like?
Whoa, that's right!
Lauren has left the building, everybody.
Lauren has left the room and the building, and... oh no, oh no, they're back.
Hi.
Hi.
LAUREN I was gonna get a paper bag to breathe in, as a bit.
And then I... I'm too defeated.
It's already a day.
We have Charlie Kirk, founder and CEO of Turning Point USA on Stay Free with Russell Brand.
What?
The fuck?
Really?
Really?
Yeah!
Last week, one of our listeners described Mike Benz as one of the more dangerous characters to come on Russell's show, and I am inclined to agree, but I do think that with Charlie Kirk here, we have upped the ante.
This is worse.
This is a problem, and it's difficult to concisely describe just how bad news Charlie Kirk is.
So let's start with current reach and influence, and then we'll take a little look back at where he came from and the things he says out loud into a microphone.
So, Turning Point USA is a non-profit that advocates for conservative politics on high school, college and university campuses.
Specifically, they claim to be promoting the free market and limited government.
In 2022 they had a revenue of 55 million dollars.
They have a presence on over 3,000 campuses nationwide in the US with over 650,000 lifetime
student members apparently.
Charlie Kirk himself has appeared on CNBC, Fox News and Fox Business News well over a thousand times.
He is also a columnist at Newsweek and his writing has been published in Fox News, The Hill, Real Clear Politics, The Washington Times, Breitbart, American Greatness, and The Daily Caller.
His social media reaches over 100 million people per month, and according to Axios, he is, or at least was, one of the top 10 most engaged Twitter handles in the world.
Charlie is the host of the Charlie Kirk Show podcast, which regularly ranks among the top 10 news shows on Apple Podcast Charts, and ranks within the top 20 most popular podcasts in general, and is also a syndicated nationally...
It's a syndicated nationally radio show on the Salem Radio Network.
The podcast specifically is aimed at Gen Z. Kirk is the William F. Buckley Jr.
council member of the Council for National Policy, a group that, quote, has served for decades as a hub for the nationwide network of conservative activists and the donors who support them.
Yeah, so in terms of the scope of this guy's influence, I'd say it rates about an oh fuck out of 10.
That's where I sit.
Yeah, so in terms of the scope of this guy's influence, I'd say it rates about an oh fuck
out of 10. That's where I sit. This guy's a big fish in this particular market.
There are moments in this show where I know my media diet and my own self-abuse comes
through. And this is not the first time in my head that scene from Snatch where Tyra
Tyrone the Rally.
The guy's like I had a rally course.
He's the getaway driver.
I believe his name is Tyrone.
Uh, no.
I don't remember.
Now I'm doubting.
Anyway, I thought it was.
Uh, but yeah, he's like in this group of dudes that are, that are kind of petty criminals, but he's been a getaway driver before and Bricktop shows up and the other guys are like, I'll go look who you are.
And he's like, I know who you are.
And he's really sad.
He knows exactly who Bricktop is and his friends that are like a little more casual criminals don't.
And I just, I'm like, I'm in it.
I know exactly who Charlie Kirk is.
Yeah.
I, uh, I had no doubt that he would.
I'm going to get fed to pigs.
I'm going to get fed to pigs.
Yes, it's that feeling kind of going into this.
The wet fish that I have to slap you with this week is especially large.
So where did this guy come from and what are those things he keeps saying out loud to apparently hundreds of millions of people?
Well, Charlie Cook is 30 years old and set up Turning Point USA in 2012, meaning he was 18.
Prior to that he'd grown up in Illinois and in his junior year in high school volunteered for the U.S.
Senate campaign of Republican Mark Cook, to which he has no relation incidentally.
Weird.
I don't like that.
I don't like that.
It's always weird to me.
He also wrote an essay for Breitbart alleging liberal bias in high school textbooks, which led to his very first appearance on Fox Business.
After high school, Kirk briefly attended Harper College, a junior community college near Chicago, but quickly dropped out.
In 2015, he did claim that he had applied at this time to West Point, the US Military Academy, and was not accepted.
He said that the slot he considered his went to a far less qualified candidate of a different gender and a different persuasion, whose test scores he claimed he knew.
He later told the New Yorker that he was being sarcastic when he said it, and even later than that told the Chicago Tribune that he was just repeating something he'd been told, and then at a Turning Point event featuring Rand Paul, no less, Kirk claimed that he never actually said it at all.
So that's fun.
Progress, you know?
Yeah, right?
Back to 2012.
So how did Turning Point USA get started?
Well, after his appearance on Fox Business, Charlie Boy attended a speaking engagement at the private Roman Catholic University, Benedictine University in Illinois, and met Bill Montgomery, who was, at the time, a Tea Party-backed legislative candidate.
Montgomery encouraged Kirk to get engaged in political activism full-time, and then joined him in founding Turning Point USA.
At the 2012 RNC, Charlie Cook met Foster Freese, a long-time Republican mega-donor, who then injected seed money into the idea.
So, what are the actual activities?
Can you imagine just fucking, like, all you need to do is just go and ask someone for money?
Jesus Christ.
Chicagoland has so much to answer for.
Truly.
Truly.
The Chicagoland area.
And conservative nightmares.
There's so much to answer for.
So what are the actual activities of Turning Point USA?
So one prominent example is the Professor Watchlist, which supposedly serves to expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.
You can find these professors by university, but also by subject on their website, varying from COVID-19 to LGBTQ rights, to abortion, to feminism, to climate alarmist, anti-Second Amendment, anti-law enforcement.
And there's one for antisemitism that in reality is documenting those supporting Palestine in the current ongoing genocide.
So not actual cases of antisemitism.
It's a horrifying project that really does evoke some serious McCarthyism vibes.
Not thrilled.
Anti-Zionism is not the same as anti-Semitism.
Not the same as anti-Semitism.
Let's just say it.
Yeah, I think we can affirm that as the position of this podcast, everybody.
So, there is also a school board watch list, which is apparently, quote, dedicated to protecting our children by exposing radical and false ideologies endorsed by school boards and pushed in the classroom.
SBWL finds and exposes school board leadership that supports anti-american, radical, hateful, immoral, and racist teachings in their districts, such as critical race theory, the 1619 project, sexual slash gender ideology, and more."
Unquote.
Yeah, a very similar website to the Professor Watchlist exists for that one, which...
Again, great!
And then there's Turning Point Academy.
I bet.
According to their website, Turning Point Academy is, quote, dedicated to reclaiming the education of our children, reviving virtuous education focused on truth, goodness, and beauty, and restoring God as the foundation of education.
And elsewhere, quote, Turning Point Academy is committed to curating and, where needed, creating free, high-quality curriculum and resources that facilitate teaching and learning excellence, advancing godly and virtuous education, unquote.
And they are also dedicated to equipping and encouraging pedagogical and administrative excellence through conferences, workshops, and online training of educators.
So, to give you a feeling for the vibe of Turning Point Academy, at the bottom of their website they've got three statistics in bright red, right?
Very alarming.
And they say 69.2% of 8th graders fall below basic proficiency levels in reading.
That's one.
73% of 8th graders fall below basic math competency levels.
That's two.
And number three is 93% of students report to have been taught CRT or gender-related concepts in school.
Just above these statistics is the phrase, there's a problem, be part of the solution.
So putting children's literacy on the same level as being taught about slavery.
Okay, like I said...
Big wow, big bad in Charlie Cook.
Yeah, he's an OG big bad.
He's none of these newfangled bad guys.
He's been around.
I can't believe he's still around.
It's incredible.
And he's only fucking 30, you know?
This is the thing that gets me, is like, this guy is only just fucking starting.
So, briefly, before we get to him saying things on Russell's show, let's take a look at some of the things he said elsewhere.
To start, he's not big on telling the truth.
A February 2023 Brookings Institution study found Kirk's podcast contained the second highest proportion of false, misleading, and unsubstantiated statements in a study which reviewed 36,603 episodes produced by 79 prominent political podcasters.
So he was the second most full of shit.
How do you even do that?
I know.
It's impressive.
It's impressive both from him and from the people doing that study.
More power to them.
On top of that, he's described trans people as a middle finger to God and really does not like black people.
In January 2024, just a couple of months ago at AmericaFest, which featured Donald Trump Jr., Tucker Carlson, and Matt Gaetz, Charlie Kirk said, quote, I have a very, very radical view on this, but I can defend it, and I've thought about it.
we made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.
Oh. So yeah, I've always seen Charlie Kirk as kind of like that linchpin, the like the,
the, you know, pin in the board from the string between like Lyndon LaRouche
and and like David Duke, like these kind of like public right racist.
And then there's Charlie Kirk, and then he's kind of another disseminator.
Because Steve Bannon, too, is an in-between.
Yeah, they're, they're sending it out into not, you know, they're taking it from like, Stormfront to OAN.
Like they're, TPUSA is very similar, I think, as far as like, market share, right, has, yes, or audience capture, right?
Yeah, yeah, like an OAN or something.
They're not main, but they're under there.
And it's The thing that strikes me about Charlie Kirk is that he is probably one of the most effective people at moving the Overton window further to the right.
He takes the most extreme shit that he can find and palatably tries to present it to millions and millions of people, And a good chunk of them accept it.
So in that sentiment about the Civil Rights Act, he's arguing that the Civil Rights Act, which, you know, bars discrimination on the basis of race, ushered in a permanent DEI-type bureaucracy, right?
So diversity, equity, and inclusion.
And he continues, quote, The courts have been really weak on this.
Federal courts just yield to the Civil Rights Act as if it's the actual American Constitution.
You've got to be fucking kidding me.
It's the law!
We live in a system of common law.
The courts have to follow the law.
That's literally how the system works, you dingus.
Yeah.
And according to him, the law is ultimately a way to re-found the country and a way to get rid of the First Amendment.
Hmm.
Okay.
Okay.
That's a language to pay attention to.
Re-found the country.
And I've fortunately I've seen more reporting about it lately.
Like the idea that they're using originalism and they're using,
you know, the Supreme court and they're like,
there's, there is a doctrine knocking around in the back rooms of
people like Charlie Kirk,
where they want to remake the country into even something that the
founders, like they want to invoke the spirit of the founders,
but they don't want to actually like they're throwing out anything
that was reasonable.
Well, yeah, and they came up with which quite a bit of systems are
interesting and would work.
Well, if they were supported and were applied equally.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And and and you know, the the refound the country sentiment is is especially when
we're talking about about the Civil Rights Act.
Like he's very much talking about great replacement shit here.
That's what he's saying, is, oh, the black people are trying to take over everybody, you know, and that's the undertone, underlying, honestly, a lot of what Charlie Kirk says, I've found.
Yeah.
Well, the re-found is like, it's harkening back to a previous, it's making America great again.
It's like, again, you know, re-found.
Like, oh, well, when we founded it, listen, everything made sense whenever slavery was legal and people weren't voting or like full human rights.
So that's like, any kind of like language that's that's that's regressive in that way pricks my you know like that's that's that's a dog whistle that i hear like yeah and and speaking of dog whistles as as a more kind of um
As a less sinister example of his bigotry, should I say, in response to the 2022 Super Bowl halftime show, right, the one with Dr. Dre, Eminem, Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, and Mary J. Blige.
Honestly, I think one of the best Super Bowl halftime shows of all time, in my opinion.
Charlie Kirk said, quote, the NFL is now the league of sexual anarchy.
This halftime show should not be allowed on television, unquote.
Sexual anarchy?
What a fucking dweeb.
That's what he got from that.
Boo, nerd.
Somebody give him a swirly.
Oh dear.
He lives a swirly-less existence and I don't think that's correct.
Yeah, right.
His head should be upside down with his head on a fucking toilet.
Yeah, or maybe, I don't know, he needs to invest in a sex toy.
He needs to do something to, I don't know, make his life more interesting, clearly.
Mind-numbing stuff.
Let's not... Okay.
Well, I mean, sexual... I don't want to think about that.
I don't know why we're going there.
That's true.
He brought up sexual anarchy.
That wasn't me, that was him.
You're punishing us.
That was him.
That's true, this is true.
So the list of reasons that this guy is terrible is honestly too long for me to fully recount here.
Because believe me, there is a lot more.
There is a lot more.
We can't.
We can't.
And not just because I don't want to.
I'm saying there's way too much.
He's been at this for such a long time.
Yeah, it would have to be an entirely separate podcast, and that's not a thing I'm willing to do.
But suffice to say, this guy is extremely bigoted, extremely influential, and a Christian evangelist, which will come up later with our darling Christian zealot of a host, Russell.
First, however, let's get into the first clip that we have of Charlie, and I'm going to skip briefly past the introduction onto the show proper to the first issues that Russell wants to discuss.
And honestly, in a lot of ways, this clip does tell us all we need to know about this guy.
Charlie, can we first of all look at a couple of contemporary stories?
Like this Boeing, we're talking about John Barnett's self, death by his own hand, or whatever you want to call it.
It's very convenient for Boeing that a man who consistently testified against their safety from a position of some experience and authority is now unable to testify further.
When you see a story like that, what's your assessment of it, Charlie?
Well, you can't help but think, is there foul play involved?
Again, I don't know.
I know none of the details.
I know nothing and I don't want to speculate beyond that, but you know, those of us that love the truth and those of us that are kind of combining forces, we see a pattern and I believe God made us in a way to recognize pattern and patterns and pattern recognition is important, which is when you see kind of unusual glitches and how things should operate.
For example, I mean, When you see whistleblowers at the origination of the spread of COVID just disappear in mainland China.
And we're just told, oh, no, it's just fine.
You know, happens all the time that scientists just kind of just disappear.
Or when Epstein quote unquote killed himself in a prison cell.
And again, I don't know anything about this.
It could just be that this guy was dealing with mental health issues and the pressure was too much.
I know nothing about the details there, but it smells.
And by the way, the same thing with Mitch McConnell's sister-in-law that's connected to the Chinese Communist Party shipping company.
I don't know if you saw that story in Texas.
No.
I think something chow where she just, I suppose, got into her Tesla and went backwards into a lake.
And suspicious it's being investigated as a criminal matter in Texas.
Again, I don't know if foul play was involved there, but we're starting to see writing in a Tesla.
I think people now have the courage to put one and one, two and two together and say, Are there other clandestine subterranean forces that are trying to remove truth tellers, whistleblowers, or threats to their current power structure?
And or do they just want to try to go back to this idea that, you know, dead men tell no lies or dead men are not able to testify.
So I don't know what to make of it Russell, except for the fact that in the new kind of, the new normal, When I see a story like this, I immediately start to suspect foul play more than just the narrative that we're being fed.
And that is largely because we have been routinely manipulated by the mainstream apparatus, by the establishment, which is the term that I love that you used.
And again, it could be that the normal explanation is the normal explanation, but if anything, if there's any lesson out of the last four years, after 15 days, the soda spread, it's that there's almost always more to the story than what the establishment is telling us.
I mean, the button on it wasn't wrong.
I know I'm coming from a very different angle than he is coming from, but like, I don't like that.
Like, well, the last thing you said was not wrong.
A bunch of stuff in the middle that was wiggity.
Yeah, I will say, you know, as someone who attempted suicide not that long ago, I do kind of resent the idea that it has to be a conspiracy.
You know, sometimes things suck and people's mental health isn't that great.
That also does happen.
And yeah, you were right. "Dead men tell no tales" is the phrase that he was desperately searching for there.
Or possibly he avoided it because it is also a reference to a Pirates of the Caribbean movie.
[laughter]
I mean...
[laughter]
I don't know that they had first dibs on that, but...
But okay.
No, no, no.
Yeah, so what's initially being discussed in that?
Firstly, you had the whistleblower in China thing.
That's the same thing that we covered in the Rand Paul episode.
According to him disappearing, he's like, no, he died of COVID.
Tragic, et cetera, et cetera.
What's then being discussed after that is the self-inflicted death of John Barnett, a man known for being a whistleblower against Boeing.
And for those not in the know, I think this is a fairly ubiquitous story, but nonetheless, after retiring, he embarked on a long-running legal action against the company.
He accused them of denigrating his character and hampering his career because of the issues he pointed out, charges which were rejected by Boeing, At the time of his death, Barnett had been in Charleston for legal interviews linked to that case.
He gave a formal deposition in which he was questioned by Boeing's lawyers before being cross-examined by his own counsel and he had been due to undergo further questioning the following Saturday.
When he did not appear, inquiries were made at his hotel.
He was subsequently found dead in his truck in the hotel car park.
It doesn't look good!
it's pretty tragic stuff and you know as you'd imagine- It doesn't look good! It does not look good!
Right, that's the thing, like as you'd imagine the conspiracy-minded side of the internet is
going buck wild over this story and you know to me it rings alarm bells, because yeah,
doesn't look good.
Honestly, I was holding my breath.
I'm like, I don't know where we're going to go with this.
I think it's fucking crazy.
I think it's... It seems very suspect and the reality is we don't have a definitive answer right now.
Definitely not.
Yeah.
There's a lot of stuff that's crazy, but also we don't have that kind of like legal framework to say this is like the...
Yeah, yeah.
Like, I tend to err towards the side of John Barnett taking his own life and, you know, from my personal position, it falls apart a little bit in terms of motive on Boeing's side for me.
Like, the whistle had kind of already been blown a while ago.
John Barnett, I don't think, was coming forward with any new information.
And even had Boeing lost the suit, it wouldn't have been in any kind of amounts that would have seriously caused the company concern financially.
They're worth $110 billion, et cetera.
Yeah.
If there weren't other cases that were like, why are you even worried about this amount of money?
You're going to get away with it?
If there wasn't other cases, like in the Octopus, they talk about it, there's like, why aren't we just settling this?
You're going to get away with it.
So there's, there could be stuff we don't know.
I just, I think that like, it's very like, it's weird.
And there was a point, I mean, this is, I'm just being silly, but it's a silly thing.
And it works in this very moment that like, maybe because Boeing is so bad at doing everything else that maybe they did this bad too.
Like y'all, you know, It was like a Jeff Gillooly when we're like, guys, we're not doing this.
You didn't send your best man, maybe, you know, like that.
Like, who knows?
I mean, yeah, it's very possible.
They've got a lot of QC problems is what I'm saying.
Yes.
Yeah, that is absolutely definitely the case.
And as well as motive, there is also the bitter reality that whistleblowers are generally treated very poorly in our society.
More often than not, they lose the community of people with whom they used to work and associate themselves and are treated as social pariahs in a lot of ways, while also suffering a hell of a lot of stress from whatever organization they're blowing the whistle against.
Yeah, that's the thing.
That's the thing.
And then throw in a long-running lawsuit where you're trying to kind of reclaim your reputation, and it's a lot of pressure with probably very little support.
And so it's feasible that it could It is, yeah.
Well, and like since 2016 or something, like has been at it.
And a legal battle that takes that long is a nightmare.
That's the thing.
And even mentioning Jeffrey Epstein, right?
That's the other example.
Like, okay, best case scenario.
Jeffrey Epstein should not have been allowed, like, the situation that whatever happened to Jeffrey Epstein, like, shouldn't have been allowed.
That should not have been the case, like, to begin with.
You know, like, all the different, like, the environment that he, you know, for whatever happened to him, happened.
That shouldn't have been allowed anyway in the same way that like this man did not have another reason necessarily no one in his life is coming forward and saying that like he had another reason that would have like this a corporate you know like a corporation being allowed to terrorize someone for years Um, is not, and maybe pushing them to this point is, uh,
also bad.
That's like, that's like best case scenario.
Um, trying to be a whistleblower against this, like, obviously problem at like,
we're seeing the results happen in real time and we have been.
And so like even pushing someone to that point is also like, let's reckon with
any of the re like any of the reasons that this could have happened in any
All of them rest on Boeing.
It's all Boeing's fault at the end of the day.
And I think that it is disheartening to see that whatever happened with Jeffrey Epstein, we're not seeing.
I mean, you know, Juslain Maxwell is in jail, and that's great.
But we're not seeing Any repercussions for like we're all we all watched this like monstrous nightmare unfold all of us and there's like fucking no consequences and pretty much just that's I think invoking that seems so oh my gosh are we gonna talk about the Tesla thing anymore?
Yeah, I'm gonna get to it in just a sec.
Yeah.
So in terms of John Barnett, you know, I don't have the answers.
But I will say I think I know a damn sight more than Charlie Kirk does here because he comes with the the admission to not knowing a single thing about the
details of the story, which, surprising.
But even then, without knowing anything, he's like, "Seems fishy."
Without knowing anything other than what Russell has just said, supposedly.
Anyway, and then he tries to insinuate the death of Mitch McConnell's sister-in-law and
shipping CEO Angela Chao was foul play.
And that one was a different kind of tragedy, with Chao apparently accidentally putting
her Tesla Model X into reverse rather than drive, backing into a pond and subsequently
drowning.
The Sheriff's Office wrote that their preliminary investigation determined it to be an unfortunate accident.
However, given that it was not a typical accident, the office is investigating it as a criminal matter until they have sufficient evidence to rule out criminal activity.
I do think the idea of it being a murder is pretty far-fetched, but that seems to be what Charlie Kirk is advancing here.
Well, it's a murder in the way that Tesla murders.
Through negligence.
Yeah, there's a negligence that Teslas are cars, not hair dryers, so cutting corners and making shitty products, we don't call it murder.
I kinda do.
Yeah, it could be murder by corporation kind of situation.
Well, yeah.
The underlying problem is corporate deregulation.
This is what happens.
This is what people have been screaming about for decades.
They said this would happen, and this is exactly what's happening.
It is funny that you won't hear that argument advanced by the guy who regularly promotes the free market.
It's funny, that.
So yeah, just a lot of not knowing anything about the situation, but being like, meh?
Is it meh?
It could be meh?
And that's, you know, from the off.
Well, the Tesla thing is weird, because if he's talking about Elon Musk, is that in this episode, or is that just what Russell's been up to?
Oh, that's just what Russell's been up to.
Yeah, no, he's talking about Musk and Don Lemon.
Well, but these things keep coming up because, you know, we talked a couple of weeks ago about like Elon Musk allowing Tye Ritchieck back on X, Twitter, or like this, the husband was talking about how like, oh, he still loves his Teslas.
Even though this is probably a fucking malfunction that like, can you imagine somebody saying that about Ford?
Like it's just, it's, it's this weird, like, it's virtue signaling.
And it's, it's very odd.
It's, it's, there's an, there's a whole other environment that's happening that feels very disconnected from reality.
That people like Elon Musk... In fact, Elon Musk is in the center of this very strange orbit.
Well, it's this cult of personality surrounding the guy, isn't it?
And everyone is going to... What personality, by the way?
Do you know, I watched the whole of the Don Lemon interview last night and... Oh boy.
Oh boy.
Well, you know, there's, you know, people that follow Warren Jeffs were in his cult were like, he's just so charming.
And this is if you follow cult news, I think more and more people are getting a whiff of this because it's just because the documentation to true crime these days is so much more available.
But like talking about how enrapturing these leaders are, and then you hear them, and it's like, Like the most boring Kermit the Frog weird, like, so I say, what personality?
How do you find these people engaging?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But somebody's out there plugging in, you know?
Inexplicably.
Inexplicably.
And it's just like, what the fuck?
But it's hard to, and I caution listeners, I know that you don't take it seriously when you hear it, or you probably don't.
And that's very, it's a hard kind of like, that's a hard mental hurdle, I think to, to overcome is
like, just cause, cause it can sound very lame and weird.
And I'm like, why would anyone be into this?
But you have to kind of accept, just like, just that asterisk in your mind is like, you know, you got to accept that people do.
And it does feel crazy.
It feels crazy, but we have to accept that, that like, okay, this is a thing that's happening in the world and we've got to deal with it.
What are you going to do?
Yeah, there's definitely a project there for psychologists worldwide, I think, to try and nail that down.
Yeah.
They've got it, but...
Whether we can do anything about it.
Right.
Yeah.
Now, uncharacteristically from Russell, we get a bit of him pushing back on Trump in this interview.
With Charlie Kirk, you know, being inextricably tied to the Trump campaign since 2016, he is apparently the right person to be asking these questions.
And the first one that Russell has is regarding the sticky wicket of the COVID-19 vaccine.
When there are paradoxes embedded even within that story, I wonder what we can learn from then.
I understand that you, my guess is that you're sort of a pretty pro-Trump person, and I know in the media space that I operate in, Trump is regarded just generally as a hero.
My own political allegiances lie more in the diversification and decentralization of power wherever possible in order that the sovereignty of the individual is regarded as sacred.
I mean that literally as well as in a way that is politically useful.
Uh, and so my support of anyone that claims from within this system, uh, that, uh, that they could make significant change is always, always tentative, but probably I'd be more pro Bobby Kennedy than Trump.
I'd love to know what our audience think.
I know that most of our audience are pretty pro Trump.
Uh, but when it comes to like, you've brought up the pandemic and what an incredible journey of learning it afforded all of us.
See how Trump maintains a degree of credit for the efficacy of warp speed, while clearly courting the many Americans that now are furious about what happened in the pandemic period, who might loosely be corralled under the term anti-vax.
How do you see that contradiction playing out for Trump?
Taking credit for the success of the vaccine, courting the support of anti-vaxxers?
Yeah, it's a very fair and important question, Russell.
So let me just state my opinion.
I was against the lockdowns, the masks very early, never took the mRNA gene-altering shot, called the vaccine.
I think it was a huge mistake.
I believe we were lied to by Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson.
And so I see that that's my opinion.
I think the audience would largely agree with me on there.
As far as with President Trump's record, I do want to just make it clear, he never forced
the vaccine.
He never was going to have any sort of punitive sort of measures.
He also very early, his instincts were right, and I wish he would have trusted his instincts
more.
He was on hydroxychloroquine and how we can't lock down the country.
Unfortunately, he was almost enveloped and he was suffocated by the medical bureaucrats
around him.
And so it was this kind of slow squeeze.
It was the boa constrictor of the CDC and FDA here in the States and the NHS would be
the equivalent in your country.
No it isn't.
It super isn't, first of all.
So the NHS is our national health service and unfortunately you don't have a comparable kind of thing.
Not even fucking close.
No, whereas infectious diseases and whatnot in this country fall under the purview of the UK Health Security Agency.
A little bit more talking shit about stuff he knows nothing about.
That's just weird.
Like, that's just weird.
Like, I know Charlie Kirk knows what the NHS is.
Yeah, yeah.
Clearly he thinks it's, I don't know, broader reaching or whatever than it actually is.
Anyway, so Trump was misled.
That's the needle that we're trying to thread here, right?
Never mind the fact that Trump has multiple times said how wonderful the vaccine itself is.
No, no, no.
He was misled by the boa constrictor of scientists and medical bureaucrats around him.
Like, it never ceases to fascinate me how Trump can be both a genius and an easily led idiot according to these people.
Like, he's all powerful and yet constantly hampered by that pesky deep state.
Yeah, is he talking about Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, who he put in charge of the COVID response?
That big pharma bureaucrat?
Come on!
Yeah, that deep state cretin Jared Kushner.
Yeah, it's just dumb.
It really is.
Now, next is a little campaign advice from Charlie to Trump.
My advice for President Trump is to say, hey, my instincts were to go for early treatments, and I was lied to by the pharmaceutical companies.
I think it is a perfect opportunity.
And President Trump is not a stranger to that kind of an argument.
Think about it.
How many times did he say that the FBI came after me?
You know, the intel agencies came after me.
It is a continuation of a narrative.
And I know you want to get in here.
Just last thing I'll say really quick is that if President Trump says that these pharmaceutical companies came into the White House and told me one thing and we saw another, and as president, I will do a criminal investigation into the big four, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, I think he could break out of this potential political problem, especially with RFK running, who is nipping at his bud right now in regards to the vaccine issue.
I tell you what, I'm excited about this conversation that you and I are having already because it's a
legitimate conversation where I don't feel like I'm just trying to frame questions in order to
establish a position but I am genuinely interested in what you're saying.
That does not speak very highly of some of Russell's other guests, does it?
I like this conversation.
I'm actually interested in what you have to say.
How surprising.
Maybe he was just lying.
That's how he asks questions all the time to anyone.
No, no, he's saying this conversation is refreshing because he's not having to do that now.
He has to do that for the rest of the time.
But he still does it!
He just did it!
He also does quite a lot of that.
Yeah!
He's just a liar.
He's explaining to you how he wants you to see him, regardless of his behavior.
That's what he's doing in place of actually doing what he says.
That's what he's saying.
Yup, yup, yup, yup, yup.
Also, the nipping at Trump's butt thing.
Weird.
He just can't quite get any popular phrase quite right, so he gets halfway and he's like, eh, good enough.
I mean, I've been there.
I get it.
I didn't cut all the instances of him doing this into our show, but he does it like four or five times throughout that interview of just random little phrases.
What are you doing?
Why?
This is weird.
Oh, if he's nervous, he doesn't seem like it seems like a real professional because I still call issues of magazines episodes all the time.
That's a word I constantly like my brain is just like that wire got crossed as an adult.
I kind of like that.
No.
Because it's extremely confusing when I'm trying to have a conversation about magazines and television at the same time.
Which, honestly, doesn't really come up these days.
I'm out of practice, that actually makes it worse.
But that's the thing, I can sympathize with that, but at the same time, it does make him seem like an automaton.
You know, like a glitching robot, like that does seem that way a little.
Yeah, if he's nervous, that is kind of, I don't know, that would be that would be interesting.
But, you know, because his Russell's platform is way smaller than Charlie Kirk's.
I think it's just.
Yeah, it's just who he is, I think.
I don't know.
Replace the circuit board?
I'm not sure.
Maybe some soldering got loose?
I don't know.
Maybe.
Maybe.
We'll have to take him off to Zuckerberg to get fixed.
Russell continues the pushback in this next clip, asking what is a long-winded and brambly but ultimately eventually reasonable question?
One question though, if indeed Trump's defense for what happened in that rather unique and difficult period is to be that it was establishment mandarins and bureaucrats that strangled his authority, how can he claim that in a second term he will be able to impose authority in a distinct and different way and Will he, if he were to say that he was going to, would he not risk further accusations that what he was planning to bring to America was a form of dictatorship which is precisely what his detractors on the neoliberal left are continually saying whilst I recognise and consider, just to let you know my position, I consider the biggest threat to our freedom to be the new strain of authoritarianism
Being all good under the auspices of neoliberalism.
That is the tyranny that we have to fear.
No question about it.
But how would Trump do things differently this time without playing into the hands of those who say he's going to slash bureaucracy and all that?
Yeah, so two things.
Number one, you're right.
The new authoritarianism, though, looks different than just a czar, a Caesar, or a king.
The new authoritarianism is by committee.
It's by oligarchy.
It is by bureaucracy.
It is by the secret society of intelligentsia that sit around and they agree that, you know, the Fauci's, the Birx's, they are largely the faceless, nameless, unidentified power structure within the Leviathan.
So when people think of authoritarianism, they just think of Putin.
When the new authoritarianism rests within the credentialed class, the managerial revolution that we've lived through through the West.
I'm happy to explore that, but I just wanted to expound on that.
So you're funders?
So the guys who give you the money to do your... that's what I hear.
Yeah, yeah, weird lack of self-analysis in terms of oligarchy question there.
So yeah, the faceless, nameless, unidentified, but also credentialed class who have apparently formed a secret society of intelligentsia are apparently the ones running the world in authoritarian fashion by committee.
Now, I didn't know about this, but then again, it's a secret, so how would I?
It's already pretty profoundly dumb.
It's a complete description of the way that he was, like, his, like, that's how you get paid, sir.
You just described your business model, like, your foundations, everything.
That's you!
Yeah, I guess the distinction is the people funding him.
I'm not sure whether they would be described by anyone as intelligentsia necessarily.
But it's definitely old white men sat in a room.
That's definitely the case.
Intelligentsia doesn't mean... I mean, it means... Like, that's his demonizing thing.
You know, that's like demonizing academia.
That's just throwing that in there.
That's exactly it.
Which also, all of these people go to, like, our legacy Ivy League.
Like, they pretend to hate learning and knowledge, but they don't actually do it.
Just like everybody pretends that they didn't get vaccinated when a lot of these dudes absolutely did, but they still want to use that kind of, you know, they want to benefit off of the rhetoric for the rabble, but they don't actually apply that to themselves.
Like, they all have...
like ties to academia. Like their names are on fucking buildings and shit.
Like this is a- Yes, yeah, absolutely.
Jeez.
With Charlie Cook, there is a more prominent and extreme thread of anti-intellectualism.
Yeah.
And so I don't think a university degree defines a person's inherent worth or intellect, right?
Especially when there are usually various barriers, financial or otherwise, to that system of education.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
That said, I do value education and or experience pretty highly if I'm going to listen to someone speak on a subject.
The experience that Charlie Kirk has is parroting right-wing talking points through various media platforms since the age of 17, and doing that instead of going to college.
Which, for various reasons, alongside the things he says in this interview and elsewhere, leads me to believe that the only shit he knows is stuff that he has been fed from right-wing conspiracy sites like 8chan, which he has been known to frequent, or the right-wing media sphere in general.
Which is why it comes to the surprise of literally nobody that this incredibly influential picture of privilege is promoting anti-intellectualism in as many forms as he possibly can.
And why it makes perfect sense that his study found his podcast to be absolutely full of shit.
It's abundantly clear that the appeal of him and his show has nothing to do with the things that he supposedly knows.
Right.
Because there's not much there.
The hypocrisy packed into like every statement is like palpable, you know?
Yes, it's dense.
Very dense.
Another thought I have is just how troubling it is to have someone so apparently influential in the sphere of education who hates the very concept of people being educated.
Yeah.
Right.
Especially like Charlie Kirk, like he's not necessarily in, he's like a barnacle in education.
He's not contributing anything to the educational process or like he's not in the establishment.
He just is allowed to latch on and be a leech and, and, and inject poison.
Like it's, that's so, Yeah, yeah, he's like, which like, also, yeah, they are there in the room a lot.
It's it's very frustrating for their ability, like their ability to be anti intellectual be anti, you know, like anti academia, but like you are so far also you're so far in it.
So it's almost like they made a step and they being, you know, not just Charlie Kirk, but like a lot of, you know, like Liberty University and like there's there are like private Christian institutions that are kind of like making their own bubble of academia as they define it.
And so you can like so you can somehow yours is different and like better and which the numbers don't necessarily bear that out like it's it's just kind of it's almost like they've made a different like pod to be a part like well you won't actually let us in academia we're a barnacle with like this you know kind of like tendrils going in puppet master style The Highline Puppet Master style, but then also being in this little bubble of their own that they're making.
It's so fucking frustrating.
Yeah.
It's a parasite from a takeover the host kind of situation.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, causing active harm rather than being any kind of benefit.
So Russell continues to push Charlie on the subject of Trump, asking another surprisingly incisive question before we get a bit of a digression from Charlie Kirk.
One of the things though, I would say, is like sometimes I wonder, and you're a good person to ask this question, if the people that broadly support Trump, which is evidently a large, huge, potentially, it looks likely, an election winning demographic, are unwilling to hold him to account.
Perhaps in the area of vaccine we've looked at already, possibly in some moral and ethical areas and maybe even some spiritual areas and significantly perhaps in when it comes to economics.
After all, is Donald Trump not ultimately a free market capitalist who ultimately wants to empower the interests of an elite class just of a slightly different distinction?
Do you really feel that Donald Trump is about the empowerment of blue collar Yeah, let me take him one at a time.
First of all, I love the Huxley reference, and I love it because he was able to paint a picture of dystopia that was centered around an entrance into almost a comatose pleasure-focused dictatorship.
You know, everybody belongs to everybody.
There's no idea of personal privacy.
Everyone takes a drug that makes you feel amazing.
It's called Soma in the book Brave New World.
And in fact, there are five writers, and you'll appreciate this, I think almost all of them, four out of five were British, that were all contemporaries.
C.S.
Lewis, Churchill, Orwell, Huxley, and Arthur Kessler, who I believe was Hungarian, who all wrote about totalitarianism and dictatorship differently.
And I encourage everyone to read that picture because it's a constellation of five different approaches.
And they were dealing with this question though, Russell, and I will get to the Trump aspect.
I don't want to dodge that, which is how does technology and tyranny work together?
That was the question that all five were wrestling with.
Which is a fascinating, fascinating question.
Orwell and Huxley flirted with that more than anybody else.
I encourage everyone to read, though, Darkness at Noon by Arthur Kessler, which is exactly what Donald Trump is experiencing.
It was all about the Moscow show trials.
It was about what happens when you forgo due process.
It's brilliant.
They all lived in that late 1940s, 1950s and published some of the most important works that are instructed what we go today.
Everyone goes immediately, Russell, to 1984, but 1984 is just one piece of kind of the, let's say, the genre of warning against the new totalitarianism of the 21st century.
Okay.
So before we get into this proper, Russell, you know, yeah, Trump is a free market capitalist, but also, so is your boy, Bobby Kennedy.
So, you know, I don't know how you think those two are fundamentally different, because they're not.
As to this, this kind of sent me on a little bit of a rabbit hole, I'm going to be honest.
So I will accept that Kessler, Orwell, Huxley, and C.S.
Lewis were contemporaries in terms of authorship and essays and whatnot, often going back and forth on ideas, and each of them did write novels about authoritarianism, etc.
But Winston Churchill is definitely a bit of an outlier amongst that group.
So much of an outlier that I kind of wondered where this specific grouping might be coming from.
Yeah, what?
Yeah, it feels weird.
And I saw that you picked up on that.
And so if you look for all of those names together, you start to see a number of pieces of media from a guy called Larry Arnn, who is the president of Hillsdale College, which is a private conservative Christian liberal arts college in Michigan.
He taught a course at Hillsdale called Ethics, Nature, and Totalitarianism.
Selected writings from C.S.
Lewis, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Arthur Kessler, and Winston Churchill.
As for why Winston Churchill is included, as a graduate student in England, Arne was the research director for Sir Martin Gilbert, the official biographer of Winston Churchill, then editing the final six document volumes of the Churchill biography.
So he's an expert on Churchill, kind of, and that's why he just kind of tacked that on there.
He's like, oh, Churchill spoke about authoritarianism, because of course he did.
He was in a war against the Nazis, you know.
So Larry Arnn, Larry Arnn is a longtime Trump ally and good buddy of Dennis Prager of PragerU.
Arnn was appointed as chair of the 18-member 1776 Commission by Donald Trump.
This was, to jog everyone's memory, the commission to combat the New York Times Magazine's 1619 Project, which serves to ensure that slavery is a subject properly taught and understood in America.
So the 1776 Commission was born to combat critical race theory and minimize the issue of slavery.
Another prominent member of the 1776 Commission was one Charlie Kirk.
So I really don't know if Charlie Kirk has read any of these books or if he's just parroting things that he has apparently learned from Larry Armstrong.
I'm gonna say ladder, that's where I'm betting in the pool.
That would be my guess as well.
But yeah, that was a fun little rabbit hole for me to pin this guy down on.
Because literally, Larianne is the only guy around putting those names together, pretty much.
And that's exactly like what we just talked about in Off Brand, is like, those are the little kind of like, It's weird when you can pinpoint that kind of thing, where it's like, oh, this is exactly why this like this person, this pundit in front of me is rattling this stuff off and that's where it's been stored in their brain.
It's like you can track down, you know, right wing memes and going viral and then magically we're talking about something completely off the wall on the news because Some ideas caught fire in this little corner, you know of the of the internet or what do you know academia?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah academia that terrible terrible thing Anyway, let's get back to Trump after that brief digression and and right so when the camera eventually pans back to him watch what Russell is doing while this guy is talking and Okay, so to Trump, to answer your question, yes.
Do I agree with everything that President Trump does?
Of course not.
But it is a fact, though, Russell, that when he was president, we experienced a blue-collar boom.
That people that work at their hands, the muscular class, people that shower before work and after work, saw the greatest increase in wages and in in their income levels.
Were there times when he was doing too much for big corporations?
Maybe, but I will say I'm more free market than not.
We can have that discussion, Russell.
Where I do believe that one of the great fruits of Western society is the ability to trade
and to have commerce and entrepreneurship with proper guardrails and of course,
a steadfast commitment to the rule of law, equally applied to all people,
regardless of socioeconomic status.
That is a bedrock principle of what we would call Western civilization, which comes out, of course, of Blackstone from your country.
Again, thank you for all the wonderful things that the United Kingdom has given the world.
But you know, rule of law, due process, common custom, all of these wonderful things.
But look, I will say this, that President Trump, the number one thing, Russell, that he would do to restore the American middle class is his stance on immigration.
So he's reading and leafing through a book while Charlie Kirk is talking.
That's what he's doing.
If this is what it looks like when Russell is interested in what someone's saying, I'd love to see what he does when the boring people are talking.
Well is he looking for like a quote or something?
That would make sense if he's like trying to be half engaged and looking for something The book he's picked up is by Winston Churchill.
So what's just happened is he was reminded by Charlie just before and couldn't help himself but pick it up and have a little leaf through.
It's nothing to do with the thing that Charlie was talking about in terms of Churchill's work.
Maybe Russell thought he could find a smart thing to interject.
Okay, okay.
That's what I'm gonna, I'm gonna give, I'm gonna call it a push on this one just because, and yeah, it's not like an awesome look, like making a podcast that you don't see is nicer.
At least he wasn't like eating a sandwich, like it could be worse.
It could definitely be worse, that is true.
As for what Charlie Kirk was actually saying, right at the end there he was making the claim that the rule of law should be equally applied to all people regardless of socioeconomic status, which I do agree with, But he's saying it just after saying that Trump is going through the equivalent of the Moscow show trials and that there's no due process involved.
The irony is so thick it's become a steel beam, the likes of which couldn't even be softened by burning jet fuel.
It's pretty outrageous.
Yeah, sheesh.
Okay.
Yep, yep.
Now, the thing that Kirk finished off with there is saying that Trump is going to restore the middle class of America by tackling immigration.
And I'm aware that probably sounds familiar to many of our American audience, and so we might think we know where this is going.
But from Charlie Kirk, what I can guarantee is that he's going to take an extra step or two.
Neil, the neoliberal project is based on three things, two of which can be easily said as invade the world, invite the world.
Invade the world, invite the world.
So President Trump, to his credit, no new wars.
He was winding down the Afghanistan conflict.
You know, he never would have allowed this Ukraine-Russian thing to go on.
He criticized NATO.
His instincts were right in that regard.
Secondly, he had the border completely under control.
He wants to try to put blue-collar, middle-class workers first from an immigration-type policy mindset.
So to answer your question is, yes, I do believe that President Trump's policies are critical of this kind of embedded Believe system that is yet to be challenged in the post-World War II rules-based order, which really is just a permanent soft oligarchy that runs from Brussels to San Francisco.
That's effectively what we live through, right?
Where the top 5% do super well and the rest of the West has to kind of struggle in barely owning property, renting perpetually.
I think President Trump In the best case scenario, we'll be able to permanently, philosophically, and politically change the default setting of neoliberalism in the West.
And in even a pretty good win, he'll be able to close the border, fix the immigration policies in the West, end the Ukraine war, which would be a moral good for everybody involved, including the United States.
And then finally, I think that from his economic policies, he wants to put tariffs on China and wants to protect American jobs manufacturing, which corporations hate and is a boon and is a terrific stimulus for what I call the muscular class, which you do not have a country if you do not have a muscular class.
Is it just me who finds the term muscular class a bit gross and weird?
as though the entire of the working class is made up of oiled up bodybuilders or something, you know?
Well, it's just another, like, what, like, it's a fr- because muscular Christianity is a thing
that is kind of a trend, you know, like, that's, that's, which, not less upsetting as a term,
but like, it's like a term kind of like bouncing around the- Again, it's like, the robot's input just was a little off.
You know what I mean?
That's not exactly what we mean.
A muscular class?
Well, it's the same as describing them as the people who shower before and after work.
These are strange things to be saying about a class of people.
Yeah, it feels like he's got an extended thesaurus, just so he has more words to say the same thing, like blue collar, right?
Yeah, yeah.
But if you try to make too many different words, you get weird.
You know?
And he's getting weird!
You got too, too adventurous.
I mean, you know, it is, um, I think it is rooted in like a machismo kind of, kind of thing.
And I think it does, it does ultimately, um, you know, as you say, serve to, uh, to offer the usual feigned reverence of the working class that the right wing always offers.
But specifically in this case I would say that of working men.
After all, you know, according to these traditional values types like Charlie Kirk here, women should be at home raising several children and baking pies and forgetting all of that silly independent stuff and anything that would require them having muscles.
So, yeah, it's kind of almost a more masculine-centric version of it, which I don't like, gotta say.
Yeah, which got bad news about traditional women's work, by the way.
Yeah, right?
How incredibly difficult and laborious virtually every task has always been.
Backbreaking.
Yes, absolutely.
Backbreaking, yes.
Yes, absolutely.
Anyway, there was quite a bit packed into that clip.
So Trump is going to fix the immigration policies of the entire West, apparently, which does make it abundantly clear that all of Kirk's talk about Western values is actually just American values, and he's just talking about America.
When he says the West, it's America.
That's what he actually means.
And there is also a soft oligarchy which is a constant train running from Brussels to San Francisco.
I mean, Brussels I get, because that's where the EU sits.
So there's some claim of government kind of thing there.
But San Francisco?
It's a left-leaning city.
Are the EU funding the gays now?
Is that what he's trying to tell me?
Or vice versa?
Are the gays funding the EU?
In which case...
I know I'm not fully gay, but I might owe some partial back taxes or something.
Is that close to Bohemian Grove?
It's not.
It's closer to LA.
There's got to be something.
There's definitely something.
There's Silicon Valley around there, but not exactly.
Do we just have an unawareness of the geography of California?
There's a university, Berkeley.
Is it that?
Could it be Berkeley?
I don't think.
I think maybe it's just one of those demon- I live in an evil hellhole sanctuary city of Chicago, so maybe it's just- Yes.
Again, it's just a thesaurus thing.
Well, we can't keep saying Chicago.
We've said Chicago too much, so I'm going to start saying San Francisco for a while before we switch it up.
You know, our Rogan episode, he was bagging on San Francisco then, and so clearly that's become the new kind of focal point.
Current scapegoat.
Yes, exactly.
At least for a little while.
But it doesn't stop it from striking the ear as weird.
As for the top 5% of people doing super well and the rest of the West struggling, that is your system of free market capitalism doing what it's supposed to do, you silly shit.
Go back to college.
It's the whole thing.
Run to its conclusion.
That's where we are at.
Almost.
And Kirk's main point, the main takeaway here, is what he said up top, right, which is invade the world, invite the world.
And he's going to expand on that shortly, so I won't get into it properly right this second, but that is his main idea of what is apparently the large part of the neoliberal project.
Anyway, Russell's put the book down long enough to ask another question.
I love your point about invade the world, invite the world, and I wonder if you believe, as I do, that if you are to be a nativist, if you are to be about your nation's interests and everyone in that nation, regardless of their race, regardless of their creed, regardless of their religion, even though I'm sure all of us have our preferences when it comes to religion and culture, etc.
That at some point, if it is decreed by referendum, then control of borders is something that has to be accepted.
But would you say that, you know, if invade the world, invite the world is the problem, is the solution stop invading the world, stop inviting the world, and you can't have one without the other?
Yes, I think that in the current setting, absolutely.
I think that the current life source of the imperial capital, which we call Washington DC, is every nine months they need another country where they're dropping bombs or another regime change type of effort.
And President Trump, again, I don't want to make this too much about Trump, but I will say to his credit, there were no new wars and he resisted interventions in Venezuela, Iran, many other places.
And so why is that?
I mean, it is a hallmark characteristic of a dying regime to care far more about abstractions abroad than the immediate concerns of your citizens.
Hmm.
So first, I mean, Trump wanted to bomb Iran so he could try and stay in office.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He really wanted to.
Throwing that out there.
He really wanted to.
Kurt keeps harping on about this.
Not for lack of trying.
Not for lack of trying.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And yeah, I'd love to see some sources and some further explanation of what he's saying at the end there.
It's the hallmark of a dying regime to care more about abstractions abroad than the immediate concerns of your citizens.
They're also, like, they're, they're really, like, and in recent months, maybe, or maybe last year, like, or I've just heard it more recently that, like, they're really hammering home the manufacturing consent kind of, like, which, like, time and place, great point, this, like, they're, they're using, it's another, like, kind of, Culturally aware, like, 1984, like, you know, like, invoking all the Tuxleys, like, you're taking the language of manufacturing consent and then kind of, like,
We're going to bend it here and shift it there and weep-wop-woop and maybe get out the country crock and grease it to fit.
Like, it's another thing I've heard a lot recently of kind of just, just, just scooching
that kind of like those those words and phrases into their needs.
Taking I think maybe more left kind of like argument approach, you know, analysis.
Someone that was, you know, kind of like on the left and then just kind of like they would do with fucking 1984 or whatever.
Yeah, yeah.
Just scooching the idea over to what they need to serve their purpose.
Yeah, yeah.
And kind of bastardizing it to the point where it almost no longer means the thing that it used to mean in terms of how they're using it.
Yeah.
And it's very much kind of following the narrative of being against foreign aid of any sort.
You know, like, oh, why are we spending this money, you know, intervening in other countries, you know, and it's...
Oh, for our own selfish reasons.
We all have selfish reasons.
Those should even be enough.
Like, just doing it the right way, selfishly, like, selfish long-term reasons would honestly bear out a lot of the same conclusions as the short, but, like, it's because it's short-term, it's, like, immediate goals, and that's why things seem so short-sighted.
Like, foreign affairs seem so short-sighted because, like, they totally are.
Yes, yes they are.
Which is a fucking problem.
Oh yes.
In any case, what we just heard was Russell very much signing on to the concept of invade the world, invite the world, stoking nativism and saying that yeah, we should all be fine with tight border and immigration controls.
When viewed through the specific lens that this guy wants us all to live in tiny theocratic ethnostates, it's not overly surprising.
But it is surprising that he's quite casually just saying it out loud these days with nary a concern in the world.
That was not the case when we started this project, that's for sure.
Yeah, yeah, it's weird.
It's, um, oh man.
It sounds like Yeah, and I think that, so Alex Jones benefited from this for a while, but then kind of ruined it, was that he was trying to position himself as like being critical of Trump, because, and now Alex kind of painted himself into a corner, and other pundits as well have kind of like painted themselves into a corner, I think Tucker probably, like
Of you're a supporter, like you are, you're on Trump's team, like you're pro-Trump, whereas what we can see through their own development is being, like still being critical of Trump because like their chats, their, you know, like their listener base is not so thrilled with how Trump, the exact thing that Russell Brought up, which is like, he's the one that made the vaccine, you know, like that's their, their, like his own, a portion of his own base turned against him because of the vaccine.
And so, or at least is, is on the fence and is very uncomfortable by being reminded that, oh, the vaccine was actually a Trump deal.
Like that kind of, um, I'm, I'm wondering, like, so that being able to have the wiggle room to be critical, uh, works extremely well for, Russell talking to his base, responding to his local channel, and I think it seems like testing – we're not necessarily learning or talking about anything real here.
He's testing these talking points of, if anybody's going to tell me How to answer my listeners, my followers, my chat.
If anyone is going to have the stock talking points that we're going to agree on, it's Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk is the one.
It's like, okay, so these are the questions I'm getting.
Tell me how to answer them in a way that can rationalize and stay on topic.
Because it feels like The fact that Russell's having all these same, like, so different, these, like, guests that are so far afield from his brand even a year ago, like, are we going to see Steve Bannon?
Are we going to see Stephen Crow?
Are we going to see Roger Stone?
Like, these are very different, which you've observed and explained, like, why we have these kind of guest-specific episodes.
It's like, The episode, like, I never, ever expected to see Charlie Kirk.
I didn't.
I just didn't.
This is, for me, this is extreme.
And I wonder if he's just like, okay, this is how we get into the fold and get the clout and get the market, you know, the share, you know?
Yeah, at this point, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if Steve Bannon came on the show.
He did a thing with Crowder when he first joined Rumble, so that has occurred.
Haven't seen him since, which is interesting.
And yeah, so at this point, I don't know, I feel like, you know, when you get to the Charlie Kirk point, kind of all bets are off, pretty much.
A dam broke with it, which I didn't think I was going to see.
When we started this, it's just interesting.
It's all influencers.
Everybody's just selling each other's makeup palettes at the end of the day, truly.
And so are we getting the Jeffree Star makeup palette deal?
Is that what we're gunning for?
You know what I mean?
It to have all the right people on your channel, because same thing came up last week, you know what I mean?
Like they're making the rounds and... Yeah, and I do think we can pinpoint the exact moment that the dam broke, and that was sometime in September of last year.
Right.
It's funny how that's exactly, coincidentally, when that seemed to happen.
Now, In the next clip, Charlie expands on his idea of invade the world, invite the world, which goes in a slightly unexpected and deeply unpleasant direction.
And then in a way that might be economically beneficial to the American ruling class, or it might be Politically useful, not only do they want to go break stuff and really kill hundreds of thousands of people in far off distant lands, but then as a way, I think it makes themselves feel better than they want to bring them back to the country that they're supposed to govern.
And that is bad for everyone involved.
And I'll just use one example of a lesser reported.
In America, we all know the movie Black Hawk Down.
Maybe you know it or not.
It's all about the failed evacuation efforts in Mogadishu, Somalia, under Bill Clinton.
And a helicopter goes down and there was a huge firefight.
And so we were involved in Somalia.
It wasn't a war, but it was another kind of one of our half wars, right?
Similar to like Gaddafi in Libya, we're kind of like half in half out, which I never liked
that because like being half pregnant, it's either you go to war or you don't, right?
That kind of spectrum has always been puzzling to me.
But then we get really involved there.
And next thing you know, we start importing tens of thousands, soon to be hundreds of
thousands of Somalians into our country, and they have not assimilated well.
And one of the most repulsive members of our government is Ilhan Omar, who never says a nice thing about the United States of America.
And she's a radical left wing.
I don't even mean that.
I don't want to make it too political in that sense.
She's just like a revolutionary type where she wants mass immigration.
And she has she is not, in my personal opinion, loyal to the United States.
But that's the project is that You invade, you get involved in certain disputes, and then you invite the people that you might have unsettled or that you have displaced.
And not just in that area, we have over 120 countries coming across our southern border right now.
In America, we have 15,000 people a day marching into our country.
We don't know where they're from, but we have some idea where they're from.
We don't know their background, we don't know who they're connected to.
Is he imagining that they're all part of some shadowy army or something?
Like an extension of the secret intelligentsia?
We don't know who they're connected to.
Okay.
Well, that talking point, that complete mischaracterization of migrants is like very on brand and completely fucking off the wall for, yeah, conservative, kind of.
Absolutely.
So that 15,000 immigrants a day figure felt high to me.
So, you know, took a look into it.
And it is possible that there have been some days within the last year that have seen 15,000 people enter the US with the intention of staying.
Which is to say, at its peak at the Texas border, there were reportedly around 10,000 people crossing in a single day.
Factor in other ways of people entering the country as well, and I could see the number possibly hitting 15,000 at its peak.
Maybe.
Fine.
But the way Charlie is presenting it is as though that's a daily occurrence happening every single day!
So, according to an estimate from the Census Bureau, 1.1 million immigrants came to the US in 2023.
That averages out to 3,000 immigrants a day, which seems a bit more accurate.
And even if you were to say, oh, the Census Bureau, they're terrible with numbers, those people.
They fudged it.
Okay then, let's double the figure, say it was 2.2 million.
That's still only an average of 6,000 immigrants per day, which is nowhere near close to 15,000.
In fact, if that 15,000 figure were accurate and consistent, the number of immigrants in the US would be increasing at a rate of 5.5 million per year, which I think people would notice.
Just a hunch.
Well, right.
That's like, I mean, who do you think is going to mow your lawn?
Make your food i'm saying charlie kirk right you who's gonna clean your house like clean your hotel rooms care for your elderly like who's gonna like again plant your hedges whatever you're not going to the the demonization of like this kind of migrant influx is so.
Fucking off the wall and crazy.
It doesn't work on any level.
It's genuinely like, it is hard for me to hear in a very special way, where like, oh, I don't benefit from that influx of labor.
I mean, I do, because I eat food, but in the direct way that like, I know who walks your dogs.
Again, I know who takes care of your grandparents.
Like, come on!
Like, what are we?
It's just so evil.
More than two-thirds of immigrants in the US are, you know, documented immigrants.
And most of the people coming across the southern border are, you know, they're seeking asylum.
Like, huge, huge swaths of them are not, they're not economic migrants.
They are leaving harrowing situations in their home country.
They're very usually like, fuck it.
Again, I don't disagree.
The way that he said, like, it's a half war or whatever, being half pregnant.
Again, weird.
We'll get to that in a second.
Right.
But like, yeah, no, we make messes and don't clean them up.
Our country does.
This is the thing.
He is striking on something that has a degree of truth to it.
Right.
Well, the one thing I did hear that was like, again, the robot glitched and said the wrong thing was he said break stuff when I think he was talking about move fast, break things, which was the Mark Zuckerberg Facebook.
Quote, break stuff is a little more limp biscuit, if you're asking my cultural kind of exposure.
But I think that conservatives also, and I feel like Charlie Kirk is a very interesting microcosm in a specific way of like, the conservative, like, Bubble makes you a weird culture robot.
Since you aren't allowed to engage with this heathen culture, you should only be watching Dove films.
Oh, and Mr. Bean, right?
Because he doesn't say anything, even though he's incredibly evil.
But he's safe for Christian kids because he doesn't say words.
So that kind of...
You're out, you're in the world, like, and not of the world.
And so that makes you say shit like a weird glitchy robot.
Yeah, yeah, that could be the, it could be a Limp Bizkit thing just accidentally creeping in there.
Well, I mean, it sounds like you just got Move Fast Break Stuff wrong.
I mean, I will say- I have a complaint about that as well, you know?
There is merit to the idea of sending Fred Durst instead of military intervention.
I'm like, send Fred Durst, see if he can figure it out.
Maybe he's an excellent diplomat, I don't know.
I'm gonna bet no.
Yeah, maybe, maybe.
Anyway, so Ilhan Omar is apparently disloyal to the United States, so that's great.
I wonder if it's got anything to do with her being brown, female, or Muslim.
In any case, Charlie Kirk is using her as apparently a prime example of how his invade the world, invite the world theory works, citing the movie Blackhawk Down as his source.
Charlie, go back to college and you might actually understand what happened.
So in 1992 there was a UN resolution that aimed to halt widespread starvation with the continent of Africa being a key target.
Thus began Operation Restore Hope, a US initiative to support that resolution.
The idea was to secure trade routes so food could get to Somalis.
The UN estimated, by the way, that no fewer than 250,000 lives were saved through this effort.
So there is merit there.
However, almost right away, militias led by the Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid began attacking and killing UN peacekeepers.
See, there was a little bit of a civil war type situation going on.
The U.S.
then set in motion a mission to arrest two of Aidid's lieutenants.
But, you know, best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry, and unexpectedly, local militias got involved, which led to two Black Hawk helicopters being downed by RPGs.
At which point, roughly 90 U.S.
Rangers and Delta Force members rushed in to rescue them, and then what followed was an 18-hour urban firefight later dubbed the Battle of Mogadishu.
18 Americans were killed and hundreds of Somalis were killed.
It was a colossal fuck-up which severely exacerbated the civil war in Somalia over the coming years and according to many this event led to the US not intervening in the Rwandan genocide or the Bosnian genocide for fear of, you know, essentially doing the same thing and making it worse.
All of this is to say, the situation described as above is not particularly comparable to the US and other allied forces like the UK, Canada and France bombing the living shit out of Libya from the skies during the civil war to oust Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
You know, they're very different situations.
Nonetheless, according to Charlie Kirk, because the U.S.
was in any way involved in Somalia militarily, that counts as invade the world and therefore invite the world.
What's interesting here is, of course, that he is seizing on a very real phenomenon, as you've mentioned, which is that when a country has been invaded with an imperialist mission of colonization or otherwise, The people of that country that's been invaded tend to want to go to whichever country has invaded theirs.
This can be for many reasons, but in simple terms, if you go somewhere, destroy people's homes and degrade the people who live there, while also telling them just how fantastic your country is, they might be inclined to make the journey.
There is a reason that the UK has high populations of immigrants from countries that were once part of the British Empire.
You know, it's not a coincidence.
Yeah, they walk around being like, we will save you, we're saving you, mission accomplished banner.
That's a tacit agreement.
Yes, yes it is.
The difference with how Charlie Kirk is putting it, however, is that he's insinuating a grand conspiracy which is supposedly the mission of the neoliberal project.
Um, in that clearly the secret intelligentsia or whoever are actively trying to get involved in armed conflicts worldwide to then bring more immigrants from those countries into the U.S.
who will then be disloyal to the U.S.
like Ilhan Omar is apparently.
Um, and this does of course tie neatly into the Great Replacement Theory narrative that the whites are all being replaced and watered down by brown people.
So that's delightful.
I do also want to say that along with many of his contemporaries, because he's used this phrase a lot so far and it's irking me, I don't think Charlie Kirk knows what neoliberalism is.
And I say this because by any reasonable definition, Charlie Kirk is a neoliberal.
The definition states, "...neoliberalism is contemporarily used to refer to market-oriented reform policies such as eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers, and reducing, especially through privatization and austerity, state influence in the economy."
It's particularly a way to implement free market policies with reckless abandon, which is what Charlie Kirk is all about.
But because the word has liberal in it, it must be bad and mean left, and it has neo in it, so it must in fact mean modern, so it's the modern liberal or the modern left, according to this fucking idiot.
Again, Charlie, go back to college.
Oh yeah, it bugs me and it's a frequent problem.
Yeah, Black Hawk Down isn't a documentary.
It's not a ring camera, it's not ring camera footage everybody.
Hate to break it to you.
No, no, and you know it's based on a book that is, you know, an account of what happened but again not a documentary, right?
Well, even the person... It's removed.
It's cinema.
Many steps of editorialising, right?
I always have to at least point out that when they're complaining narrative and fiction with non-fiction, and it can look a lot like non-fiction, but it's still a movie.
Yep.
And also, again, there's plenty of military people out there that have excellent critiques that could take you 20 minutes to listen to.
It's really not even that complicated.
He has no excuse to not at least be educated on this.
I mean, or whatever.
I don't know.
It's using a talking point.
I don't know.
Yeah, yeah.
I like it.
So from here, we get a story from Charlie about Winston Churchill, and we start to pivot in another terrible direction.
That point on technology and tyranny, Russell, if I may, I want to make one other point, and it's a great anecdote.
Um, Churchill talks about the first time he saw the machine gun and what that, what that did to him.
And I don't remember, I think it was the Darvishes.
I could have this wrong, but it was some sort of, uh, an African proxy conflict and it was the.
Yeah, okay, the Boer War, thank you.
So you know this anecdote, and I don't need to- No, do it, do it!
So essentially, there were these incredibly courageous warriors of the indigenous people of the country they were fighting in, and they hyped themselves up, And they went through all of their pre-battle rituals and ceremonies.
And they charge into battle and England or the United Kingdom just turns on the machine gun and mows them down.
And Churchill writes in his private diaries that was the first time where valor, courage, heroism meant far less than technology and sophistication.
And it bothered him for basically the rest of his life. He wrote about this all the time,
where he's like, "War has completely changed. It's not about how bad you want it. It's not about,
you know, are you willing... Like the whole Braveheart scene, right? Where, you know,
one Scott can take on, you know, 10 soldiers of the English army. No, it's just about
who has the more sophisticated weaponry."
And then he talked about what does that mean then for the state and how that could potentially destroy people's freedoms.
And so that's one of my favorite topics to explore because we're really now at the intersection of technology and tyranny, a mass surveillance state.
Overly medicating the people.
We are the most medicated population in the history of the planet in the West.
The most suicidal, the most anxious, the most depressed, the least happy.
And I think a lot of these things are connected, which is, have these technologies actually made us better versions of ourselves?
Are we flourishing?
And I'm more in the direction of no.
I actually think these technologies that were supposed to liberate us are actually the handcuffs That are not keeping us free.
I think this is the first time I've heard someone invoke Winston Churchill to try and tell me that Western medicine is bad.
And specifically, you know, when you drill down on these people about what medicine is bad, they settle on SSRIs and antidepressants in general, right?
So he's using a story about Winston Churchill being supposedly horrified at the destruction a machine gun can cause to tell us that SSRIs are bad and is part of technology being a tool of oppression.
Well, also, yes and.
I'm going to engage with Charlie Kirk on his own terms.
Here's my issue.
Churchill should have known already about military technology.
Literally, since the time of King Nebuchadnezzar.
And before, is like, if you know anything about history, and if you have any fucking intellectual goddamn curiosity about the human condition, in your bones, one cell in your body, learning about history and understanding that, like, technological superiority and resource allocation is exactly what has shaped this world, and military history, if you're an intellectually curious person.
Yeah, yeah, that does seem to be a requirement that Charlie might be lacking in.
Let me tell you about arrows, dog!
Crazy!
Crazy!
I am happy to be proven wrong on this from someone who knows more than me, because you know, Churchill did write quite a lot, but I could find no evidence of him being haunted by the advent of the machine gun, and particularly its use in the Boer War.
In fact, upon reading his account of his involvement in the Boer War in South Africa, Churchill seemed to bloody love machine guns and thought they were just terrific at mowing the enemy down.
That sounds more accurate as well.
It does.
Quote, Boers on the skyline at 2,000 yards, tat tat tat tat tat tat tat.
Half a dozen times repeated, boars galloping to cover.
One, yes by Jupiter, one on his back in the grass.
After that, no more targets to shoot at.
And from further on, these three machines set up in a most exhilarating splutter, flaring and crackling all along the edge of the wood."
Unquote.
Yeah, he sounds haunted.
Hates it.
Even if they get to the point of being haunted and they talk about it in their journals and write letters to their friends about it, a la Thomas Jefferson and slavery, you can be as pressed about it in your alone time as you want.
If you're not gonna do anything about it while you're in your place of power, you can sit and fucking spin, my guy.
I don't give a single solitary shit.
That's also why, like, hearing the quote that you just read, oh, well, that rings a lot more true with, like, what happened.
Yeah.
Feels like it lines up just a little more accurately with Churchill as a human being.
I get the distinct feeling Charlie may have gotten this revisionist perspective fed to him possibly by someone like Larry Arnn.
Yeah, and he's just giving very John Birch Society.
I feel like Charlie Kirk is another, not just what I referenced earlier as far as far right and even KKK dudes in politics, allowed to be in politics, but the legacy of the John Birch Society is exactly what he's... Those are the steps that he's following, I think, I feel.
They're a lot of the same stuff.
Yeah, in a very kind of polished and presentable kind of way.
Yeah, which was always the plan.
Yes, indeed.
Anyway, back on the subject of medicine being bad, after a bit of a bramble, Russell asks, what is a fairly decent question about libertarianism?
Yeah, I generally agree with that.
If you, like me, feel that there is a necessity for minimal intervention from any authoritative force, whether that's a state force or some kind of corporate power that acts as its proxy, whether directly through the imposition of legislature or just through the share scale of its influence the kind of soft power that
can be a good for the good global corporations that are all the way i consider to be using the veil of america to
conduct their globalist projects how would you if you are if you do believe in small
government be able to reduce the impact of for example the pharmaceutical industry mentioning is you just did
the health crisis that they've facilitated, induced.
What would you be able to do about Big Food's ability to ensure that people live on diets, essentially giving them heart disease, diabetes, and cancer?
Without an interventionist state, how do you control the power of major corporations and their negative impact on the American population and the world population?
Boy, that's a huge topic.
That is a huge topic, Russell.
What are you doing?
We're supposed to be complaining about these things, not providing solutions to these things.
That's someone else's job.
I'm supposed to come on here and whinge, not come up with ideas.
He's looking for a talking point.
He's like, I don't know how to address this.
Maybe even with myself.
Here's a hole.
Please fill it.
Give me some of the goods.
Yeah, yeah.
Because I do think the question is a good one, because it does confront the fact that libertarianism and neoliberalism, both by their very nature, just allow the free market to do whatever the shit it wants without any guardrails.
So how would you regulate industries that need regulation without government intervention?
It's a tough one to answer.
I read this a little bit earlier, but Trump bringing jobs.
Because the whole, like, Coal miner, blue collar, like using working Americans as a set piece, as literal pawns on a board that mean absolutely fucking nothing to them.
They don't give a single solitary shit about the safety or dignity and the lives of a worker.
For sure.
I feel like that's been proven.
Somehow I have to keep saying it.
But like, how would Trump bring jobs without intense Very like serious regulations like strict like not not they wouldn't be staying free these corporations to force that because they also were sold a bill of goods from Trump and conservatives about keeping jobs like keeping manufacturing jobs in America.
The government didn't do what they needed.
The government facilitated jobs leaving.
They're not coming back.
That fantasy that's being sold, it's amazing to me that that fantasy is still being sold to the American people, that they're going to bring solid manufacturing jobs back.
Baby, that's not happening.
It's not going to fucking happen.
Nope.
You would need to even even the way that maybe they would make the argument and I'm trying to just like devil's advocate or at least try to entertain this thought that like eminent domain and you know like strict like or just or.
Exploiting, you know, like, a local government process through, you know, like, exceptions, especially with, like, tax breaks.
That's the one thing that, like, has been at the feet of every single city council that I've been hearing over and over.
Citizens are getting fucking ignored of these, like, gigantic tax incentives and, like, Money is being spent, our money, our city's money is being spent, and then, like, just feeding into money pits of like, oh, well, we're going to incentivize and we're going to make our cities desirable for these corporations, and that's how we make the jobs without controlling anything when, oh, actually, no, you are making massive changes to, like, you are making insurmountable
Like impacts on the budget of my city you are changing laws you are exploiting loopholes you are like you are doing all of these like heavily like just big government.
The biggest government, the biggest hand of the government is required.
Huge tax breaks to billion-dollar corporations, you know?
Exactly, which are, like, we're now living in this, like, this was these big ideas of job creators to just gouge the city, and now we're living in this kind of, like, post-tax, like, corporate tax break boom, And now we're like now again like it's coming up at every fucking city council like any any like you know creators got like some kind of local effort.
It's about like please stop ruining our cities by gutting us.
So you can have Nike here?
Please stop.
Yes, the Nike campus looks good.
The rest of the city is crumbling around it.
Please fucking stop doing this and stop using our money to pay your friends.
Like it's because it's, we're in where it has grown to a level that we, we drive over every day,
you know, like we're trying to drive over every day. Like it's, it's, it's do you.
And it's exactly what Russell's saying.
He's like, well, don't we need intense, intricate, labyrinthine regulations for the thing that you're asking for?
I was thinking the same thing.
I was like, how would Trump bring jobs?
Make jobs, want jobs, do jobs?
Exactly.
So this is the question, right?
How would you regulate industries that do require regulation without government intervention?
And let's hear Charlie's answer, right?
Well, first of all, I think it needs to start with the people and shows like this.
We need to talk openly about the benefits of eating clean and rejecting high fructose corn syrup and not eating foods that are highly ultra processed and eating whole foods.
I think that we need to continue to talk about that from a bottom up cultural perspective.
But as far as the government.
And I say this in America, we have this very bizarre allowance for pharmaceutical companies to advertise.
I say this as a small government guy.
It should not be allowed.
Pharmaceutical companies should not be able to run endless advertisements and be able to buy our news company, media companies.
That needs to be ended.
And you saw, I'm sure the video brought to you by Pfizer, brought to you by Pfizer.
I mean, they literally purchase airtime on the mainstream networks.
Okay, that last part we can agree with.
Pharmaceutical advertising is weird and fucked up and there's a reason it's illegal almost everywhere.
Not quite sure how it solves the problem of regulating the pharmaceutical companies who do require regulation without government intervention, but fine, sure, I agree with the point he's making.
The first part, however, the way to address food-related issues is apparently talking about them, because no one talks about food these days, avoiding high-fructose corn syrups, because, I mean, you can't ban them or get rid of them or anything, because that would be government intervention, so avoid them, and start eating whole foods and unprocessed foods.
Lauren, you actually live in the US, so I'm sure you can answer this.
Over there, is it more or less expensive to eat unprocessed whole foods compared to processed foods?
Oh, it's, yeah, it's way more expensive to eat.
Way more expensive!
The way that he's describing, yeah.
And when was the last time the minimum wage was raised?
15 years ago?
Oh, okay, okay, right, yeah.
It's still like $7.25 an hour, federally.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's still like $7.25 an hour federally.
Yeah, yeah.
See- - But let's ban TikTok, right?
Let's ban TikTok.
So those two things combined kind of, um... Well, you see my problem, right?
Again, what we have here is two incredibly wealthy individuals telling us how we should all live.
Russell, as previously mentioned, has a net worth of at least $20 million, and I'd wager it being a lot higher in reality.
And Charlie Kirk!
has a net worth somewhere between 5 and 22 million dollars depending on who you ask,
but I know for sure that his salary at Turning Point USA alone in 2021 was $407,000,
and no doubt it's gone up since then, and that puts both of these white men in the top 0.01%
wealthiest people alive today. So yeah, not a wonder that they don't understand how the problem
is not solvable by "Oh just eat vegetables that haven't been processed!"
Well, if that's their position, then obviously they're supporting legislation about curtailing food waste in America, because it's a gigantic fucking problem and it absolutely has to do, is tied with class and access and money, so, right?
That's what they're going to talk about next, is regulating The disposal of perfectly good food, and for the sake of capital, for the sake of profit.
They're going to talk about that, right?
That would be big government, I'm afraid.
I'm familiar with a lot of legislation that people are on the grassroots level, like they could use this platform.
Ah, it's big government!
So that's what they're going to do?
No?
It's big government.
Nah, I can't, can't, can't.
It's too big!
Too big!
Tax breaks?
Fine.
Doing that?
No.
Yeah, yeah.
Too big, too big.
So yeah, and this is without even fucking addressing the concept of food deserts and all the other fucking things surrounding this issue that make these two ding-dongs entirely irrelevant.
And the things that they say.
Good lord.
Now from here, somewhat predictably, we pivot into some anti-vax shit.
Ronald Reagan made a massive mistake.
Ronald Reagan effectively indemnified the vaccine manufacturers in America that said they were not allowed to be held criminally or civilly liable for the injuries that vaccines do to children or to adults.
And so effectively what happened, and that's how it works in the States, and I don't know if it's similar in the United Kingdom, Where, let's say that you get a measles, mumps, and rubella shot and you go into a seizure, which happens more than people ever want to acknowledge.
I'm not anti-vax, I'm just saying this is a fact, okay?
The way it works is then you fill out a form, it's called the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, and all the claims are funded by the taxpayer.
So the vaccine companies never have to touch it.
So they have no liability.
So I want you to imagine that you're a multi-billion, multi-hundred billion dollar enterprise, and you have no check and balance from the consumer.
We wouldn't tolerate this with airlines, with banks, with credit card companies.
Again, there's a little bit of moral hazard.
We bail out those companies far too often, but just from a small government perspective, we have created a big government Protection racket of the biggest companies that never have to answer for their products potentially harming the consumers.
Now, the reason they passed it, Russell, was they, well, we need to increase our vaccination rates and we need to protect these companies.
And my answer is, but if the product itself is truly safe and effective, then you shouldn't be afraid of the claims that are coming after you in court.
Then fine.
Little Johnny's in a wheelchair.
Did your vaccine do that or did it not do that?
And pay the claim or fight it in court.
And so there's this protection racket that nobody wants to touch, which is basically immunity for the four big manufacturers.
The two biggest in America are Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson.
They basically run the American Pharmaceutical Project.
And if right now I went and got a COVID shot, And all of a sudden I drop dead or if I had, you know, lasting health effects, I cannot see Pfizer in court at this moment.
Now there's, there's a little workarounds that people like Del Bigtree and others are trying to be able to finally get them to be able to hold accountable.
But so to answer your question, Russ, what would I do?
The first thing I would do is I would say, you no longer get special taxpayer funded protection as a pharmaceutical company.
Yeah, that's a good move.
I agree with you on so many issues.
Yes, you do.
Even Russell did a, like, at the same time we did.
If you're not watching, we all went, oh, wow.
Okay.
Yeah, we all had a little chuckle to ourselves at what Charlie Boy was saying.
So, real quick before I get into it, the seizures from the MMR vaccine situation, that's an occurrence of one in every thousand.
So, you know, more often than people like to talk about, sure, whatever.
You know, I mean, my daughter just got the MMR vaccine just the other day.
Anyway.
Measles is ripping through Chicago right now, by the way.
Dope.
Okay, great.
Yeah, that seems like a good time to talk about that.
Cheers, Charlie.
So, right, here's the thing.
If you got a vaccine of any kind and then had a health issue that was listed in the potential side effects of receiving said vaccine, How difficult do you think it would be to conclusively prove in a court of law that it was the vaccine which caused the health issue?
Because, to my mind, it would be a very fucking difficult thing to do in terms of legal kind of burden of proof, right?
And yet, according to Charlie Kirk's methodology here, a small government system of free market capitalism running amok would work because people would be able to sue vaccine manufacturers.
It's like, well, that's clearly not a feasible kind of situation for so many reasons.
And there are many reasons that for certain vaccines, the manufacturers are not held legally responsible.
It's not for all vaccines, by the way.
And most of it does come down to public safety and the verifiable need to have these vaccines manufactured.
But that doesn't mean that they're just happy to put whatever the fuck in them and then everyone dies.
If there are public health concerns with vaccines, they are prevented from distribution or only allowed to, or they get recalled, or only allowed to certain segments of the population.
Much like Johnson & Johnson or the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, both of which have had their distribution to certain portions of the population hampered because of side effects, which means they in turn make less money from the product.
Is that what they want?
Absolutely not.
Their motive is to make it as safe as possible for any and all humans, not just for public health, but also for profit in the free market system, that thing you love so much, Charlie.
And, of course, the reality is that just because we can't sue Pfizer, it doesn't mean they're just allowed to do whatever the fuck they want.
These industries are regulated.
These vaccines are checked and triple-checked by the government on behalf of the people.
The only way that system falls apart is if you become libertarian or neoliberal like Charlie Kirk and start suggesting deregulation and small government is the fucking way to go!
It's, the VAERS system is to prevent lawsuits.
Because you can still sue Pfizer.
People do it all the time.
Yeah, for sure.
The VAERS, I feel like we've covered the VAERS thing before, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, we have, but you know, Phil Phelps has been there.
Well, I mean, it feels like it's...
I'm exhausted by arguing about it.
It's been four years now where I learned about it a lot.
I learned a detail I never thought I'd have to, and now I do, and I didn't consent, and now I have to know about it.
And again, just like CRT, as soon as people started, as soon as conservative fucking talking heads started using this as a cudgel, and as a talking point, and spinning a narrative about it, I learned about it immediately, and I was like, huh, that's not what they're saying, and I still have to hear about it!
Yeah, I'm sick of this.
I'm sick of it.
I'm fucking sick of it.
Because it's, yeah, it's like a good thing.
And you can sue Pfizer.
You can, I mean, you know, okay.
Yeah, yeah.
Instead, we're all going to get polio and measles.
Fantastic times we live in.
Right.
Well, in parts of Chicago, obviously ripping through, I was being, you know, I was being a little extra.
It's more that I'm just, like, scared for kids.
Like, it's just... Yeah.
I'm so maybe like that sounded extreme it's my that reflects my feelings about it because it's so fucking preventable it's so avoidable and I'm not a person that necessary you know yeah I got my vaccines as a kid and Theirs is there for parents for people that are hurt like there's that's it's a great thing that we have to support people with you know they don't have to sue to get the help that they might need.
Yeah.
It's a net positive.
It's like a good thing.
Exactly.
Rather than attempting, you know, what would be an incredible uphill legal battle that would be nearly impossible to try and actually litigate.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
It's levelling the playing field between a gigantic corporation or a couple gigantic corporations and regular people.
They're trying.
Yeah.
Now, Russell has a rare moment of introspection here on his show before asking Charlie Kirk yet another tough question on Trump.
I mean, tough for their media sphere anyway.
He's having a smart day today.
I just want to briefly mention, because I think attempting to try to create conviviality, congeniality, and the necessary solidarity that I believe voices from the periphery have to achieve in order to meaningfully challenge the establishment, fail to mention the significant fact that it was Trump that Push for prosecution of Julian Assange under the Espionage Act and did not pardon Assange when he left office.
And it's like these kind of omissions that trouble me even though it is plain to see for anybody that the establishment, whether you mean the legacy media, Big Pharma, the military-industrial complex, and of course the neoliberalist establishment itself do not want that man in power in the same way that they are terrified and loathe Elon Musk.
And for me, that's how alliances must be formed on that old adage, my enemy's enemy is my friend.
No, I was 0 for 3 on my pardon attempts at the end of the administration.
I publicly wanted Assange, Snowden, and Ulbricht.
Ulbricht was the guy who started Silk Road, and they had the book thrown at him.
So I'm there with you, with Russell.
So I failed when I was trying to get at least clemency or at least a dropping of charges for all three of those.
Okay, so, I mean, firstly, for one, good on you, Russell, for sticking to your guns, or at least asserting that you do in fact believe any of the things you say.
Credit where credit is due and all that.
Saying like, hey, in my efforts to be, you know, congenial and all that, I've often put aside the fact that, yeah, Trump was the guy who, you know, went against Assange and all that, which I take issue with personally.
Okay, good for you.
But in terms of Charlie Kirk's response, Albrecht, that is a weird pull.
A Churchill at the end, if you will.
A Churchill at the end, right.
And again, it sent me down another little rabbit hole.
Because it was like, ha, that's weird!
Because like, Assange and Snowden, like, whistleblowers, both problematic to me, but whatever, okay, I can understand the argument, you know, on a basis of principle.
But Ulbricht, the guy who operated Silk Road, he was given double life imprisonment plus 40 years without the possibility of parole for his conviction in engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, narcotics conspiracy, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and conspiracy to commit computer Hacking.
Basically, Silk Road was a dark website which allowed people to anonymously purchase narcotics, sometimes weapons, all manner of nefarious and illegal shit.
Federal prosecutors alleged that Ulbricht had also paid $730,000 in murder-for-hire deals targeting at least five people And Ulbricht was separately indicted in federal court in Maryland on a single murder for higher charge, alleging that he contracted someone to kill one of his employees, a former Silk Road moderator.
And then, so I was like, why the fuck is this happening?
So a couple of years ago, the likes of Congressman Thomas Massey and then Libertarian presidential candidate Joe Jorgensen We're arguing for the release of Ulbricht on the basis of his imprisonment being against free market principles and supposedly his sentence being a violation of the eighth amendment which prevents cruel and unusual punishment.
Okay.
Like, fucking weird.
Fucking weird from start to finish.
And even weirder for Charlie Kirk to hop on board with the course.
I'm like, why?
Just why?
Really weird.
Really weird.
Oh, how strange.
How completely strange.
Yeah, okay.
Now, in the next clip, we pivot to the inevitable discussion on Christianity.
But I know you and I, I think, have deeply in common, as well as like, you should just see two books that are on the desk right now.
This is Winston Churchill's Thoughts and Adventures.
This is C.S.
Lewis's The Problem of Pain by C.S.
Lewis.
So there are many areas in which we are clearly aligned.
And I know that you wanted to talk somewhat about Christianity.
And I sometimes wonder when 10, 20 years ago, when the Republicans were in the ascendancy, when the occupation and war that concerned most people was the Iraq war, when the warmongering leaders had the name Cheney but the first name Dick, when it was a Bush in the White House, when it was Halliburton rather than Pfizer that was their corporate... We get it!
entity that caused consternation. The assumption was that Christianity was leveraged to legitimize
American expansionism and now it's a sort of an extraordinary kind of anti-Christianity that
is used to, I don't know, as a kind of spearhead for nihilism, for materialism,
for abandonment of all real values.
So I just wonder where you think Christianity becomes significant when forming a political opinion and how that relates to fundamental principles like peace, non-interventionism, compassion, love, the simple rules of Christ, love thy neighbor as you love thyself, love God with all thy heart.
Pretty basic and profound principles.
How do you think that those ideas ought inform politics?
I mean, I think it is the biggest ingredient that informs our politics.
And Russell, I watch a fair amount of your stuff.
I love your curiosity towards Christianity.
I think it's awesome.
And I don't want to speak for you out of turn, but I'm a serious Christian, and I believe it is the way, the truth, and the life.
Happy to talk more about that.
So, I mean, Russell is not just curious about Christianity.
He does Bible readings for his locals channel.
He is an overt Christian zealot who believes secularism and atheism are the downfall of society and that we should all live in a Christian theocracy.
That is the point he was tentatively driving at in his usual bramble-y sort of way, and Charlie Kirk, being a Christian evangelist, is all on board.
Didn't Russell say he wasn't going to force very specific answers by couching his questions so ridiculously?
Didn't he say that he was going to not do that to Charlie Kirk?
Yeah, yeah, he says a lot of things, doesn't he, this guy?
Observation!
Blue sky thinking!
Yeah, and apparently there's an anti-Christian situation occurring in America.
News to me!
That's news to me!
Yeah, I struggled in finding any evidence for that.
I think you're going to continue to struggle.
You might be right, you might be right.
Now, so what happens next is Charlie goes on a bit of a tirade, and so I'm gonna take it chunk by chunk, right?
Here is the first bit.
But from the political side, look, the two things you mentioned, you know, Jesus Christ our Lord said that all the laws of the prophets are upon these two things, which is Leviticus 19 and Deuteronomy 6, 3 through 5, which is love your neighbor as yourself, and then love the Lord your God with all their heart, soul, strength, and mind.
And so let's just take Leviticus 19, which by the way, it's an amazing, not very quoted or studied piece of the scriptures.
In that very same chapter, by the way, is also that you shall not favor a rich man or a poor man in a court of law.
That is right there where we get the idea of Western blind justice.
That you don't give the Wall Street banker a break just because he bankrupted our economy in 2008 because he works for Goldman Sachs.
And so that biblical principle we have forgotten in the last decade and a half.
We have one set of rules for the oligarchy and another set of rules for the commoner.
If that's your principle, then why aren't we allowed to prosecute Trump for his crimes?
Oh, that's different?
Oh, okay, that's different, is it?
So, he has to bring up Leviticus here, which is pretty well known as one of the more contentious Bible chapters usually brought out for a good ol' bit of gay bashing by the Christian right.
Now, there are various things in Leviticus I could trot out, which I know for a fact Charlie Kirk does not follow.
Wearing clothes of two fibers is an obvious one, eating shellfish, that kind of thing, you know.
A little home maintenance, kind of like a This Old House portion.
Yeah, absolutely.
There was a bit about a guy, if he rapes a female slave, then that's okay and doesn't require stoning to death because the slave is owned and not married.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
It's a great book.
And so, yeah, this guy is, you know, a little pixie choosy with the Bible, while also somehow making the case that it's the Word of God and should all be followed.
But the specific portion from Leviticus 19 I would read back to Charlie Kirk is this.
Charlie Kirk?
Charlie Kirk!
Flip!
Flip!
Charlie Kirk!
Sorry.
Yeah, the quote I would pick from Leviticus 19 is this one, right?
When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong.
You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
I am the Lord your God.
Yeah, love immigrants, Charlie.
That shit's everywhere.
That shit's all over the Bible also.
I mean, the Bible is also just chock full of contradictions.
I do love the love thy neighbor kind of refrain from Christians in general, but definitely from these fucking jokers.
It's an amazing loophole if you fucking hate the dog shit out of yourself.
If you absolutely despise yourself, That's true.
Love thy neighbor as you love thyself.
That's absolutely true.
Run into that a lot in my life, where it's like, oh, you think that you're like you, you're terrible to yourself.
I'm gonna stay out of your way.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think ultimately any set of religious beliefs are only as good as the person who is following them, because of this picking and choosing.
I could pick some incredible, delightful things from the Bible and form a set of beliefs on that.
I could pick some… Absolutely.
They do.
And I could pick some absolutely horrifying shit and form a set of beliefs on that.
And, you know, those would be two wildly different people following somehow the same book.
You know, it's, yeah, I think that applies to almost everyone.
I mean, they're all bopping around here with too many guns, so it's going great.
Yeah, it's going wonderful.
So next, he takes his love of Christianity to a bit of a dark place.
But look, we're entering this kind of era of new paganism in the West.
This idea of atheism or not believing in anything is rubbish.
Everybody believes in something.
Everybody has gods.
Everybody has something they worship or something they prioritize.
The new religion basically is some manifestation of pleasure first, The trans agenda, anti-racism, you could call it a hyper-environmental earth-worshipping agenda, and I'm nothing against environmentalism, but when it gets to the point of where the worship of the earth is above humanity, I have some big moral problems with that.
Okay.
Short clip, lot packed into it.
He decried the trans agenda, anti-racism, and what he described as a hyper-environmental earth-worshipping agenda, saying that if the worship of the earth is put above humanity, he has some big moral problems with it.
And Charlie, Charlie, Charlie.
Saying dirty hippies is a lot more efficient.
Isn't it?
If there is no Earth, there is no humanity, you stupid fuck!
Go back to college!
Good God!
Anyway, he's not done with his bigotry about trans people, so buckle in, here we go everybody.
And Christianity stands against these false gods.
In Genesis 1-11, the order and separation that we have enjoyed in the West were detailed.
The separation between man and woman, good and evil, holy and profane, man and nature.
And that established order is necessary for human beings to flourish.
In my personal opinion, the establishment is doing a very good job of destroying both that order and separation that we're living through.
I believe there's a spiritual element to this.
I believe it comes from the demonic, where they do not want you to have the distinctions of male and female recognizable anymore.
The distinctions of good and evil recognizable anymore.
The distinctions of nations anymore.
And dare I say, if you do not have distinctions, then you have this very confusing oneness.
And distinctions, I think, are what makes life exciting.
In fact, isn't that what they're always telling us?
Diversity is our strength?
They don't believe in that.
They do not believe in things that must be separate, must be separate.
Oh, good God.
He identified the unity within the effort towards unity.
He's like, oh, this oneness, but oh, but it's bad.
No, it's called intersectionalism.
It's an intersectional approach, which is both diverse and unified, if we were all on the same fucking page.
Yeah, right.
He just said it!
Just listen to this little white boy tying himself in knots over the audacity of people for wanting to be treated with respect.
You know, it's not a confusing oneness we're after, Charlie.
We don't want everybody to be the same.
We want everybody to be who they are.
With the acknowledgement that both sexuality and gender exist on a spectrum and are not a binary system.
If you're a cishet man, great.
If you're a pansexual nonbinary person like myself, great.
All we want is to be treated with equal amounts of respect and that is it.
That's the whole fucking game.
That's the whole thing.
Oh dear.
And one more thing to mention alongside this is that the narrative he's spinning of the left wanting a confusing oneness does, again, actually tie back into the Great Replacement Theory of the white race being diluted by all these brown people coming in until we all look the same.
It's a pushing of the exact same thing.
It has the same undertones.
So that's great.
Yeah, yeah.
Charlie has more to say, because of course he does, and he caps off his little hate speech tirade with this.
And so, in Christianity we believe that all of life points you towards a recognition that you are born a sinner, that you are not perfect, that you're far from perfect from the glory of God, and that God in the incarnation took human flesh, and that we must accept Christ our Lord And in that moment, you are born new and transform permanently and eventually enter into eternal life.
That ethic, that kind of normative Christian theology, is what largely built the West, which I am daily involved in trying to keep the West from committing suicide.
And I hope we can have a restoration of those values, those ethics, and those principles, because I believe it is the truth.
There's some things in there which I strongly agree.
Oh dear.
Russell had overall been doing quite well in terms of pushback in this interview, but he listens to a hateful tirade from Charlie Kirk shitting on trans people, the concept of anti-racism and environmentalism, And all Russell has to say about it is, oh, there's some stuff in there with which I strongly agree.
Like, fuck me.
He's made it clear he can push back when it's an issue he gives even the tiniest sliver of a shit about, but those three things?
Like, I can't say he agrees with all of it, for sure, but he at the very least agrees with some of it and offers zero pushback.
Well, my my my position is he doesn't like he's he's just he's mining talking points that these are these are like he's as far as what looks like pushback.
It's the stuff that he's got like it's the talking points that he needs to manage.
Yeah, like do my work for me.
Give me Give me the mailing list.
Yeah, exactly.
The part I know with certainty that Russell agrees with is Charlie Kirk wanting to have a restoration of Christian values, ethics, and principles within the West, as he calls it, which just means America, And in Charlie Kirk's conception of it, it specifically means straight white straight white male America, which Coincidentally is where misogynist and let's return to traditional values guy Russell Brand is also going to land Yeah, definitely definitely with that and the the concept of the West committing suicide is is another dog whistly great replacement
phrase, by the way.
If you ever hear that, that's generally what they're talking about, is committing suicide by low birth rates among white people, etc.
Delightful stuff.
So glad this man has so much influence.
It's really good.
Well, it's pathologizing.
Yeah, you're pathologizing in that instance.
It's so convenient on like a number of levels.
Now, in the next clip, we get a bit of a tech issue, and there have been a few throughout the interview.
There was a cursor on screen for a good chunk of time there that was amusing me.
But for some inexplicable reason, the camera lingers on a solo shot of just Charlie Kirk while Russell goes on a bramble here.
And for Lauren and viewers, just watch how uncomfortable he is with what's happening.
And I wonder sometimes about how ideas like, you know, render unto God what is God's and unto Caesar what is Caesar's are utilized to facilitate the kind of aspects of imperialism, Charlie, which are not great.
You know, like Western civilization, many of its philosophies, its art, the Renaissance, there are so many things that are incredibly beautiful, certainly in theory, but there is no question that it has led us here.
And I feel that that is not because of its inclusion of Christian values, but because it has disavowed them, legitimized them, metastasized and metabolized them in order to create false idols, which were evident in the 1980s, the 1970s, the 1960s, and they're yet more evident now.
In fact, I would see us as being on a kind of Rather than, you know, the last 10 years representing a particular aberration.
So that's one thing that I feel we could address if we had time, but I'd love to, I know that
you've got a show in a minute, mate, your team has told us, and I'd love to just for a moment
cover exactly what you feel, what your personal connection to Christ is.
*Maniacal Laughter* Oh dear.
That was so batshit!
Like what- Yeah.
So, so profoundly- We ended there?
That's where you were going?
That's where we're gonna land.
And yeah, there's only a couple more clips of this, but yeah.
That was such a profoundly awkward clip.
And for some reason, an audio clip from the very start of the interview was played in the middle of Russell speaking.
Just delightful.
I love it.
Anyway, Russell's little jag there about false idols is actually, all he was saying, he was confirming and affirming Charlie Kirk's position that we as a society are worshipping things like the transgender, anti-racism and hyper-environmentalism.
And that is a problem.
Russell agrees with that, and goes a step further to say, hey, this has been a problem for a while, actually, in various forms, you know, going back to the 60s, and we need to address it.
Very interesting.
Very interesting.
Yeah, I don't want to watch Charlie Kirk squirm like that.
It was... I do enjoy a good, like, watching someone mentally figure out, like, watching someone's face and they're trying to figure out when to, like, hop in the double dutch, you know, like, hop in the jump ropes, and then, like, and then you're like, nope.
No, I don't get to.
Like, and then just kind of be like, I'm gonna wait.
There is not this.
But that was crazy to land on.
Yeah, that's, well, we kind of breeze past everything.
So let's talk about your personal connection to Christ!
Okay.
So yeah, sadly before we can delve much further into the concept of what the problem has been since the 60s or whatever, these two run out of time.
And so yeah, the final question posed to Charlie Kirk is based on his personal connection to Christ.
Oh, I mean, I'm nothing without Jesus.
I'm a sinner.
I fall incredibly short of the glory of God.
We all do.
I gave my life to the Lord in fifth grade, and it's the most important decision I've ever made.
Everything I do incorporates Jesus Christ.
He is the living God.
And I know for some people it might sound goofy or wacky, but what makes Christianity different, and I respect all different views, but Christianity is not like all the religions, as I mentioned.
It's the idea of the divine and the Logos becoming flesh.
And in John 3, Jesus says you must go through another birth.
He's talking to Nicodemus at this time, that you must be born again.
So when you accept Christ, the Greek word is metamorphosis, basically, you completely change.
And I could tell you, Russell, even if I'm having a bad day, I still have the joy of Christ.
Even if I'm having, you know, a difficult time, I'm born new.
And, you know, the scriptures tell us that this is the greatest love story ever.
Because the only explanation for why the eternal would come down to the temporal, to the broken, to the flawed, and to the dirty, is out of love.
The word love in English is incomplete.
The Greeks had many words for love.
For example, phileo, brotherly love.
Eros, romantic love.
Storge, love between a mother and a child or a father and a child.
But the word love for Christ in John 3.16 is that agape.
It is sacrificial love.
It is the love of one that would die for you.
And so Christ our Lord came down, lived a perfect life, died a brutal death, defeated death on the cross and in the grave to live against that we might have life eternal.
And I have a joy that doesn't get muted, that keeps me going.
It is my why, and I hope I can bring that light to as many people as possible.
and it is the most important component of my existence, and I'm blown away just to be able to say
that God loved me enough to send himself, his son, to die for us so that I might live.
Hoo.
The whole, you know, talking about the Greek kind of, the Greek different words for love, you know,
I distinctly remember having that conversation while I was still in high school, and I feel like that's the level of conversation that we're Oh, I remember the week that our Southern Baptist pastor found Greek translations for love.
Oh, my God.
It was just as fucking useless and insufferable then as it is now.
I'm so bored.
You know what?
It was interesting the first time.
I was probably 12, and I was like, huh, etymology's neat.
And that's what I thought.
Yeah, see, I was giving it to... Now I'm bored to death!
I was given it by a friend who at the time was really into the philosophies and works of Eric Fromm, you know, who was one of the cultural Marxist people, actually.
Not the bad ones, but you know, he's one of the good philosophers that was there trying to do stuff.
Yeah, a buddy of mine just got really into that and was like, whoa, look at all these different things, you know.
Okay, fine.
Words are neat.
Yeah, when you're 16 or 17 or whatever, great, cool, okay.
But yeah, a 30 year old man rattling this off.
And there are a number of things to take away from that clip.
But one of the most revealing to me is that apparently the most important decision Charlie Kirk
ever made was when he was around 11 years old.
Except children don't really have agency.
That decision wasn't made by him, even if he thinks it was.
That decision was made by--
he was guided down that path by his family, by his community.
And that's kind of all that's ever happened to this man, I would be very genuinely shocked if Charlie Kirk was capable of independent thought at this point, to be perfectly honest.
Like, I haven't heard or seen him come up with even a single cogent thought that can't be traced back to nodding along with the shit the people around him are saying.
That's why he said break stuff instead of move fast break.
I'm telling you, it's because he's not exposed to the actual culture.
He gets this like weird bits and pieces that he has to just like regurgitate.
And listen, I won a number of silly little prizes memorizing scripture when I was a child.
I love the little weird monster finger puppets we used to get that were kind of like clear plastic.
Tight, right?
Yes.
Scripture's got me those.
Cash that shit in.
Fine.
You're a grown-up.
Sir, you're grown.
Let's have thoughts.
Yeah, we were born in 1993.
Oh dear.
I remember 1993.
Gross.
1993 oh dear, uh, yeah also also
I Don't think it counts as death if you come back to life,
but maybe that's just me being nitpicky about stakes are Stakes are low.
Yeah, kind of.
And I mean, the whole concept of being both a father and a son.
Well, his whole thing about like, oh, this love of Jesus and I have such a great day.
Would you feel the same?
Let's try it!
If you didn't have boatloads of fucking money, Charles, it might be a little harder.
You might have more of a hard time.
And not to say that's for everybody, but I'm saying to Charlie Kirk.
I think you might be challenged.
Yeah, you might find it a little bit harder to see the light on a daily basis.
If your daily basis is drudgery and poverty, you know, maybe it's a little bit harder.
Yeah, now we get one final clip here and Russell decides to close the show with a Bible reading.
Let's go out on John 3, starting from 5.
Jesus answered, verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born of water and of the spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.
That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit.
Marvel not that I said unto thee, ye must be born again.
The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but cannot tell whence it came.
Charlie, that's a great way for us to wrap up our conversation.
that is born of the Spirit. Then over the page 16, verse 16, that you cited, "For God
so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should
not perish, but have everlasting life." Charlie, that's a great way for us to wrap up our conversation.
It's good for us to focus on the many areas that we agree and find new ways that we might
form new confederacies to oppose this neoliberal establishment power that tyrannizes us all.
Would love to have covered that, some of that demonic stuff you touched upon, but surely we will speak again and me again.
Charlie, thank you for your support and thank you for this conversation.
God bless you too, man.
Thank you.
Oh, we can only pray that Charlie Kirk comes back to talk about demons.
You know, that at least would be fun for me, you know?
Like, oh, this is fantasyland, let's talk about demons all day.
Well, we have to remember, we're talking about demons and we're talking about, like, there's two other dog whistles that we need to listen for, dear listener, right?
One, qualifying, like, basically categorizing atheism and any kind of, or nuns, right, as, oh, that's just another religion.
Um is an insult to your intelligence and is just is is putting any um discussion about uh social imperatives or or like any kind of just like discussion about how society like the benefits of separating the church and state all that kind of stuff or like why people are atheists validating that belief structure um you know like validating that like that's Saying that it's just another religion, and not just atheism, any number of things, right?
It's not.
A religion is a specific thing.
Religion is a thing.
And then things that aren't religion aren't religion, right?
I forgot the other one.
Anyway.
That's cool.
That's cool.
There were two that were going to fit together.
Let me see.
We'll see if it comes back.
We'll see if it comes back.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Also, it appears neither of them are aware that Charlie Kirk is actually a key component of that neoliberal establishment power that tyrannizes us all.
But hey, I can't go expecting these two anti-intellectualist crusaders to be literate and understand words now, can I?
And just a final thought on that.
Neither of these two men went through higher education of any sort, so like beyond the age of 18, right?
And I was trying to think of the main thing that I personally learned from both my creative musicianship degree and the bit of a law degree that I did.
And what it came down to was critical thinking skills, I think.
Now, these are absolutely things you can develop outside of higher education, but I do think it's a lot harder without instruction and without someone pushing you towards critical analysis and how to critically analyze something in as objective a way as possible.
And really, it's that skill, critical thinking, that both of these men lack in earnest.
Every single one of the ideas they put forth goes more or less unexamined, and certainly is not examined critically.
They've picked them up from people they respect, and like, in Russell's case, Gareth, and in Charlie Kirk's case, the Republicans around him, and they don't even for a second examine any of these views before just It's a lot of rote memorization masquerading as intelligent thought, truly.
And not to say that, listen, we can learn a lot from other people, and especially in my experience and in my life, referencing other people's learning and understanding is the best way to go.
That's not rote memorization.
Learning is not repeating, and that's what's being rewarded.
The other thing I was thinking of is the other dog whistle was the demons thing.
What you were saying about demons, right?
Right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That is a talking point that is invoked by Christian fundamentalists as even if you are a person in the world who May or may not believe in God, and is expressing views they disagree with, they don't have to listen to you because you could just be possessed by a demon.
A demon could be making you say it, so they have found myriad ways to take your agency from you, even if you are standing up and trying to do anything about it, trying to buck the status quo of any kind.
They have so many different ways to not listen to you.
And the demon thing is like, it's fucking insidious, because then they can act, and that's how they see Love Thy Neighbor, right?
It's like, oh, well, I love you, and I care about you, which is why I don't want you to be gay.
Like, you can be gay, but you can't, like, act gay.
Yeah, all of them.
Maybe the gay bit is just actually, you've got a demon inside you, and we need to send you to a camp.
We need to send you to a camp and have an exorcism.
And a lot of states in this country.
Hmm.
Yeah.
And with that, with that, you know, you can write off anyone or anything, pretty much, you know, just anything that's inconvenient at all.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's a get out of jail free card that they can just throw down any old time.
It's amazing.
100%.
Amazing.
100%.
Anyway, yeah, that was that was Charlie Kirk.
Woo!
Woo!
Nobody said anything.
Nobody said anything.
Kind of.
Yeah, it was both incredibly hateful and incredibly uninteresting in a lot of ways.
Empty calories.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And this guy is one of the most popular communicators in the world, somehow.
Money.
Funding.
How is he gets a lot of money?
He does get a lot of money.
Yeah, money and telling people what they want to hear.
Hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And and parroting parroting right wing talking, but and really, honestly, just moving that Overton window as far as it can over to the fucking right.
And yeah, it kills me that this guy is only 30 years old.
That's that's what that's what I keep having to come back to him like this guy is already This dangerous.
Yeah, but there are a number of like of religious programs and institutions in this country that have been especially like training grounds with their express purposes to make Charlie Kirk's.
Yeah.
Um, so again, like in that environment, I don't think that the, the university, the college he would go to isn't going to change what he's like, isn't going to encourage, uh, critical thinking in any way that like this, the pipeline includes college.
If you so choose, I don't think he needed that extra training.
I think he had his, he got his trail training wheels off early because he had the agenda down.
Yeah, he had the indoctrination already down.
He was already good.
I don't think a college experience would undo that for Charlie.
You know, there's too far gone.
I do think he needs to go back to college to actually learn things.
But that's the thing.
We've made enough colleges in this country that that will not guarantee a fucking thing.
Oh yeah, he'd just end up going to fucking Larry Arnn's college.
He'd end up going there and learning the alternate history of Winston Churchill.
Well, that's the thing is, at the beginning of the episode, you know, what we have talked about, what I've talked about until I'm blue in the fucking face, and we talked about, you know, on the main show and on Off-Brand is about, like, just the assault on, like, the decades-long assault on the education system.
And he's integral.
To that fight and he has been for a long time.
Yeah, that's so your little acts of resistance listeners if you so choose is to either listen to sold a story there's a series believe NPR or PRI has put out and that's why reading levels are so bad in America right now.
It's terrifying and 1619 project is free.
Absolutely.
You can watch it, you can listen to it, you know, pad it, bop it, whatever.
You can find it, and that can be your little act of resistance.
It's around in podcast form.
It's great.
Yeah, go to the website.
There's lots of reading.
There's tons of resources.
Infographics and so much good stuff.
And that actively fights the fight against people Like Charlie Kirk and, you know, the fucking 1776 Commission and all of that bullshit.
Alright everybody, hopefully next week will be less of a horror show.
I can't imagine it somehow getting worse, but I guess I'm not gonna hold my breath.
Yeah, yeah.
But if you want to support us some more, we do head to patreon.com slash onbrand.
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Because this Sunday, March 24th, I'm going to have my shop stocked and have a full like actual Line of things that you don't just have to be in Chicago in three specific stores to get to.
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Haha, this is how we start is in a scrap of MDF.
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So from magnets to shrinery, everything in between, I've been making smaller stuff so you don't just have to get a bigger thing.
Great for renters and for people that have apartments.
I'm not trying to cost you your deposit.
That is actually in my Instagram.
If you're on Instagram, it's the easiest way to see all the updates.
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There it is!
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Oh, it's so bright today.
Yes.
Real gold.
We're brave.
We send gold.
Hell yeah.
And yeah, take a little nosy around Lauren's shop while you're there.
Yeah!
All right, patrons, we will see you Sunday for some off-brand goods times.
And the rest of you, we'll see you next week.
We love you very much.
Thank you for sticking with us.
Bye!
Bye!
Love you, bye!
That's not win-win-win.
That's lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie.
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