Charlie Kirk on Donald Trump's Indictment | PBD Podcast | Ep. 253
PBD Podcast Episode 253. In this episode, Patrick Bet-David is joined by Charlie Kirk, Adam Sosnick and Tom Ellsworth.
0:00 - Start
2:48 - Charlie Kirk on Gen-Z
7:48 - Could Islam Ever Take Over The World?
20:52 - The Downfall of Values and Principles In America
32:47 - Reaction To Twitter Being a $250 Billion Company
44:15 - Reaction to Donald Trump's indictment
1:01:57 - Will Bill Clinton Ever Be Held Accountable?
1:08:06 - Was The Term Conspiracy Theory Created By CIA Following The Assassination of President JFK?
1:13:41 - Reaction To China & Brazil Agreement To Ditch US Dollar
1:39:51 - Horrifying LBGTQ Schoolbook Revealed
1:43:31- Bernie Sanders EXPOSED In Congress For Being a Capitalist
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Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Anyways, hey, today's podcast is episode 253 with the one and only Charlie Kirk.
If you know Charlie or you don't know Charlie, this is a man that's going to be a force to be reckoned with for decades and decades to come.
Whether you love him or hate him, you're going to have to deal with them.
So if you're watching this, because you watch a couple of our podcasts and you come in here because you like to post some of the guests that we bring or you support him, this man's not going away.
I had a chance to be at one of your fundraisers a couple months ago.
I watched you raise 41, I think it was 40.
I don't know the number.
I thought it was $40 or $41 million.
It was a lot.
In an hour and a half.
And he is the founder of Turning Point USA, started it at 18 years old.
It's grown into a bunch of different things that they're doing today.
You like confrontation.
You like debate.
You like banter.
You like a good fight.
You're a fighter.
That's the feeling I get from you.
So it's great to have you on the podcast.
I'm a big fan of yours, Patrick's.
I love your channel.
But more importantly, I love your story.
And I love what you've created.
You create a lot of value for a lot of people.
I appreciate you.
And we've had you, our guys have had you at multiple times.
It's one of the most amazing things.
I mean, it's hard to create things.
It's hard to create big things.
It's hard to create big things over a long period of time.
And you've made a lot of people wealthy and yourself wealthy because you earned it.
And going to the event in Vegas, I think I did two, one remote, one in person, just hearing their story is unbelievable.
I mean, these are people from every walk of life, every background, and they have purpose and they have meaning and they own their own business and they're doing really substantial things for themselves and their community.
So good on you.
Yeah, thank you for that.
So for the audience that, by the way, we have a BizDoc in the house as well.
We just came out of two board meetings this morning, back to back.
We had to run.
I'm like, Tom, where are you?
He says, I'm walking downstairs.
I said, downstairs is not 59.90 anyways.
You have to come over here.
This Thursday, we're going to do a live podcast here with a couple hundred people.
Giuliani will be here.
Ruben will be here.
It'll be interesting.
And then we got SauceCast here with us as well.
Charlie, for people that don't know you, if you don't mind taking a moment and giving a brief background of how Charlie became Charlie Kirk.
Okay.
Well, first, I didn't go to college.
So that's important in the biography.
I've been doing this.
It'll be 11 years in June, running Turning Point USA, which is now the largest organization of its kind in the entire conservative movement.
My why, why I do what I do, is to try to restore the promise of the American founding, to live in a free society.
We believe the Constitution is the greatest political document ever written.
We believe America is the greatest nation ever to exist.
And we believe we're failing to teach that to young people, which is one of the many reasons why our country's falling apart.
And then I also host a national radio show every day, which I'm actually taking off today to help to be with you guys and kind of just have a nice day off.
And then also podcasts, which is one of the top five conservative podcasts out there and do a lot on social media as well.
So if I was in high school with you, 14 years old, let's just say we're in 10th grade, 15 years old.
Who was Charlie in 10th grade?
I was very political then and also hyperactive.
So that hasn't changed.
Eagle Scout, football captain, basketball captain.
Didn't sit still well.
I definitely would have been medicated if I was in high school today.
ADHD medication, definitely.
Some call it a gift.
Some call it a medical.
You know, you have an issue.
It's a blessing and a curse.
That's right.
But I try to channel it for the good, right?
That's what I love about living in a free society that's increasingly less free, but you can make something of yourself in this country.
Charlie, I want to piggyback on something you said that I think was very powerful, and I don't want to just skip over it because I believe you're 30?
29.
29.
So you're going to be 30 this year?
In October, yeah.
Okay.
Happy soon to be.
30th birthday.
Yeah.
30, 30.
Highly anticipated, I guess.
One of the things that is very disappointing to me as someone who just loves America, left, right, up, down, is actually what you said about the younger generation these days and their lack of patriotism and lack of appreciation for America.
The stats are when it comes to polling.
As far as love of country and patriotism, baby boomers and older, 73% love America, proud to be American.
Gen X, 56%.
Millennials, 36%.
Gen Z, which I don't know if you're Gen Z or something far worse than we are.
But we've got our own problems.
16% proud to be American.
So, Pat, completely hit the nail on the head.
Whether you love you or hate you, you're going to be around for the next 30, 50 plus years.
I got a market opportunity, wouldn't you say, Patrick?
Exactly.
You got a blue ocean strategy.
You've got a growth opportunity to try to get people to love the country they live in.
The people that are going to be listening to you, Charlie, are not the boomers.
I mean, they're 65, 75 plus.
It's going to be the millennials and Gen Z. How do you get them to love America again and appreciate your message?
Yeah, it's challenging.
So I actually go to the target demographic themselves.
I mean, I visit campuses.
I speak with these students and kids.
And praise God.
I mean, our campus tour this last semester was the most successful we ever had.
We actually couldn't find rooms big enough to fit all the students that wanted to come to our events, which was great.
And look, I have very strong political opinions.
We could talk about that if you guys want.
But the basic core argument of why we love America shouldn't be political, which is the American founding was an unbelievably unique moment in human history because it was reliant on some classical observations of human nature that made claims against tyranny and the pursuit of liberty,
that believing not in sectarianism or tribalism, but instead in the individual and the dignity of the individual, that is, you can disagree at this, but the founders largely believe that it was made in the image of the divine, therefore there's worth and there's dignity of that person.
You don't have to accept that, but at least you can accept the idea that the individual is sovereign and matters.
And then you build a system around that that has turned into the most amazing society ever to exist.
And now we're deciding to end that.
So to your point, two points.
Yes, the younger generation has deep resentment for the nation because they're taught that in the government schools and they're taught that in popular media.
And secondly, they don't understand or they cannot properly articulate why this is the greatest nation ever to exist in the history of the world.
And there's great reasons for it.
It's my job to try to convince them and educate them, albeit in 15 to 20 second sound bites with the attention span decreasing.
But I believe my purpose is to try to make sure my daughter, who's seven months old, lives in a free society.
And we are currently heading in the wrong direction very quickly.
Okay, so let's go with that.
Let's go with that.
Because, you know, a lot of people are following Tate.
Tate became the most viral person on the internet.
He and I were speaking when he got out of jail.
And, you know, they're now on house arrest.
And we're having a conversation about some of the things that's going on.
He went from, evolved from being a guy that was an atheist as a young guy coming up.
Then he started seeing what the Christian denomination was doing and what they stood for.
These are interesting principles, kind of welcomed it.
Then he partially lost respect in the Christian religion, the denomination that started compromising and saying, yeah, we'll accept this, we'll accept that, we'll accept this.
What about this?
And then he says the only religion that seems to not break when it comes down to their values is Muslim.
And then he went and became a Muslim, and that's what he supports.
Now, that may be extreme to you, but the part that when I talk to a lot of the youngins who are following him and following what he's saying, that argument is a good argument to say if you are going to be conservative, if you are going to be a Christian, well, your church is starting to say, yeah, it's okay.
Pope, it's okay.
You can come in.
As long as you bring money, you can come and you can come in versus the Muslims saying, hey, you can't.
So what do you say to the criticism the West is getting by a lot of people saying the West is no longer what it once was and it's past the tipping point, meaning there's no longer a saving of the West.
What do you say to that?
Well, the first part, you're probably right.
I mean, we're in a complete terminal decline.
And it's hard to disagree with that.
A moral decline, economic decline, financial decline, fiscal decline.
I don't think we're past the tipping point.
To the Andrew Tate part, I think that's a bad reason to convert to Islam.
I don't think there's a good reason to convert to Islam, because there's plenty of uncompromising Christian churches.
But generally, yes, it is true that a lot of Christian denominations are becoming more like the world and not following the word.
Happy to talk more about that if you want.
But that is the question: where is the West?
And you kind of have to take a pulse.
There's plenty of reasons for optimism.
I'm seeing a kind of renewed sense of patriotism in certain sects.
I'm seeing what we're doing at Turning Point USA.
I'm seeing parents get more involved in school boards.
At the same time, we're living through what Nietzsche predicted in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, where he did not proclaim it, but he stated God is dead.
And again, it's misquoted because people think he was celebrating the death of God.
He was not.
What he was saying is that, hey, you in the West, if you are going to replace God with consumerism and the Industrial Revolution and hyper-individualism, be careful what's going to take its place.
And we're kind of living through the kind of mixture of synthetic worldviews that take its place when Christianity or a cogent Western morality deteriorates.
So what do I say to the compromising Christians?
We'll stop compromising.
And then I wouldn't also necessarily say that Islam is attractive as a substitute of that, but I'm happy to explore that as a child.
It's not about the substitute of that because there's some stats we looked at a couple months ago on a podcast.
We had this guy that was talking about how underpopulation is the problem, not overpopulation, how the world can handle it.
And then we looked up the numbers on the podcast and we saw, I'm going to be wrong by a couple percentage points, but pretty close within a couple percentage points.
Out of 100 people that are born in the world, 33 were Christians, 31 were Muslims.
But out of 100 people that die in the world, 32 were Christians, only 10 were Muslims, which means the young, you know, Muslims are having more kids and they're a lot younger, which means by 2035, the world will be led by Muslims having more Muslims in the world than Christians.
And why do you think that message?
Because a lot of times you see that message and all you think about as well, the first thing we think about is also Muslim extremists.
I mean, every Muslim is a Muslim extremist, which is not.
It's a smaller sect of the majority.
But if the messaging, what are they doing that their messaging is more attractive?
We're NBA players, football players, Hollywood.
Some people are starting to say, well, I'm kind of going to lean towards this than Christianity today.
Yeah, I don't think we have to speculate.
I don't know if you have Cassius Clay up there, which was his name before Muhammad Ali or Kareem Abdul Jabbar.
We do.
We actually got Cassius Clay up there.
The idea of men.
Dave Chappelle, by the way.
Yeah, Dave Chappelle.
Is he a Muslim?
Is that right?
I didn't know that.
Tyson.
What?
Tyson.
Yeah, the idea, especially black men, being drawn to the Muslim faith is not new because it really does, it's unapologetic in the patriarchy, right?
So in a hyper-feminist world, it seems attractive.
And again, Malcolm X wrote extensively about this.
I mean, I don't subscribe to a lot of the appeal of it because Islam is not true in my worldview, but we could discuss that.
I don't think it's actually useful of our time today.
But you're hitting on something really important, Patrick.
In a world that has gone mad in chaos, people yearn for order.
Now, you could be too far in the order direction, which I think Islam goes too far.
I do not want to live in a theocratic fascist country.
I like have freedom of speech.
I like having dialogue.
I like private property rights.
I like entrepreneurship.
That's why I think the West is the best, because you balance order with spontaneity and unpredictability.
If you just want order, you can live in Saudi Arabia, but that's not a free society.
But I think the West has gone way too far away from having order as a bedrock principle.
What the founders tried to establish in the Constitution, especially because of the world that they built it in, is how do we have liberty, but also we have the rootedness of eternal wisdom so that liberty does not become licentiousness.
And that's exactly what we're living through: is that it's no longer the pursuit of what is good, it's the pursuit of what makes me feel good.
And those are two different things.
So people like Tate or people previously in the 60s or 70s, I mean, you could list a lot of people that convert to Islam because it's very attractive because the strong man archetype is not just present in Islam, it is demanded in Islam.
That the man is not just the head of the home, the head of the society.
And so it's very attractive in a world that's gone mad.
I think that's the wrong answer, just to be clear, but I can understand why certain people would be gravitated towards it.
So who would you say today is the most famous non-pastor Christian in the world that's getting others to say, I also want to be a Christian?
I don't mean Joel Osteen.
I don't mean if you go to some of the big pastors that we have.
I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about a guy that's in Hollywood, that's in the NBA, that's in the MLB, that's in music.
Who are some of the biggest ones that are converting, that are converting?
I mean, maybe Tim Thibault, but he's not exactly as successful.
But you're pinpointing something really powerful here, which I totally agree with.
First of all, if you find, I mean, Justin Bieber is not exactly someone I would consider theologically sound, right?
But at least he says good things about Jesus.
But the Christian world is lacking in the cultural figures that embrace the worldview.
Whereas in the 50s or 60s, you had John Wayne.
You had every major act, not every, but you had Joe DiMaggio.
You had, before that, Babe Ruth, that were outspoken Christians.
And now you look in the world, it's either secularism or just kind of as agnosticism.
And any Christian celebrity that might be outspoken, they have to always preface it with social liberalism.
I would say maybe Mark Wahlberg, he's done a pretty good thing.
I was just going to say Wahlberg.
You saw what he did on the Zoom.
I think that's true.
You know, the Catholic faith.
He moved to Nevada.
Explain why he moved out of LA to go to Nevada with his family, and he's thinking about turning Vegas into the next Hollywood.
He even just caught some heat.
Of course he did.
From just doing the ASEAN.
They say he's a gay hater or whatever.
But this is exactly where I'm going with this.
So where I'm going with this is the following.
So Whereas a lot of people who are Christians will go and they'll go in a community that's safe and they'll talk to one another where it's a safe place.
Whereas Muslims will go out there and they'll baptize and they'll convert.
Where, you know, if you look at the two and you'll say, well, one is staying quiet about it, the other one's being bold about it.
One is advertising why he is, the other one is not.
But at the same time, the media will defend Muslim, but the media will not defend Christianity.
The sports teams will say, hey, you have to be a little bit more understanding about the Muslim religion, but Christianity, they can get shots.
So how did that happen?
The evolution of where Christianity went, hey, the Judeo-Christian, the great nation, America, look at the values and principles that we have.
Where did the fall happen?
Boy, that's a powerful question.
It's hard to pinpoint a certain year, but there's certainly an era.
In the 60s or 70s, these revolutionaries took control of a lot of institutions, and the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, got perverted and changed.
I encourage anybody to find me a Netflix, Amazon, or Hulu documentary or film in the last 10 years that portrays someone that is a Christian in a positive light.
And in fact, this was pinpointed recently.
I can't remember who.
An actor came out and he said, hey, guys, why is it the pastor always has to be like the abuser or the embezzler or the and you think about the archetype, right?
The archetype is if you see a Bible in an Amazon film, you almost can assure that that person is going to be a villain or at the very least a hypocrite.
Rarely is that the person that is going to be acting ethically, acting morally.
And that's a complete change.
And it's done rather subversively, right, in our culture.
And so, but here's the thing: kind of the post-60s worldview, the moral view that came in in the post-60s, and it didn't really set in until now.
It took 60 years, is hyper-individualism.
And I'm all for entrepreneurship and for people to succeed, but you must balance that.
You must counterbalance it with duty and obligations.
If it's all about just the pursuit of your own pleasures and your own delights, you will be not just empty.
I think you're going to be miserable.
And so we build an entire society, I think, on this very dangerous moral pretext.
And we wonder why we have the most depressed, suicidal, anxious generation in history.
I totally sympathize with every accusation of American Christianity that you could imagine.
They could be hypocritical.
Their churches are too big.
They don't give enough to the poor.
I think some of that is a little silly.
But it is a fact that as we have turned our back on American Christianity with the roots of it, that we are less free, we are more confused, and we are filling it with these other fake religions that we could talk about.
The religion of anti-racism, the religion of scientism, right?
Even earth worship at times, which is hyper, you know, global warming.
Yeah, environmentalism.
And so there's a great book by Tom Holland.
He calls it Dominion.
It's not a great title, but he, it's Holland with an E.
But yeah, it's how Christians Remade Revolutionize the World.
I encourage everyone to read it.
And he's actually a secular agnostic who argues that what we consider to be common sense, what we consider to be normal, is a traditional inheritance from the Christian history.
And you might not like Christianity.
You might not believe Jesus is the king of the world.
I do.
But you should at least accept that if you remove Christianity as the bedrock of your civilization, be careful what you fill it with, because currently we're filling it with garbage.
Yeah, so a couple things based on what you just said.
One, I saw Andrew Schultz the other day.
You know, Andrew Schultz, the comedian.
I don't know if you're familiar with Andrew Schultz.
Yeah, he's, to me, I think he's one of the most talented comedians.
I can watch his clips on replay, and the guy makes me laugh over and over again.
There's only a couple guys that make me do that.
I've probably seen his clips.
I just you know who he is.
He's incredible.
He said the other day he went to church.
Yeah, yeah, he's great.
And he says he went to church the other day.
He says, in the first three minutes of being in church, he started crying.
That's not his brand at all.
Andrew Schultz's brand is not too serious.
This was an attack.
No, this was not a joke.
He was being serious about it, right?
Now, if you go to the Justin Bieber story, and we can go to Hillsdale, you know, not Hillsdale, but Hill Song and all that stuff.
I saw that first time.
I saw a lot of it.
Yeah, so a lot of that, the challenge then becomes also to say sometimes it's overly judgmental on who's going to be the Christian to help bring the brand and bring others towards it.
There's a challenge with that as well.
But for me, I saw Wall Street Journal's article recently came out with values.
I'm sure you saw that as well.
The collapse of the American values.
Patriotism, community involvement, having children, and going to church have just descended in meaning.
But money is up.
Money is up.
And that's that hyperindividualism.
That's what you were talking about.
And again, I am a capitalist.
I think that markets work, but they must be in harmony with other duties that make the money meaningful.
Otherwise, it's just nothing more than pleasure or things that will erode in dust.
So it must point towards something.
You must aim high.
That was the Western ideal, right?
And that's why the Declaration is such a beautiful document.
It mentions God four times.
And in fact, in the end of the Declaration, it's basically a prayer.
We don't teach this to our kids.
It's an appeal.
It says we appeal to the supreme judge of the world.
And they're pointing high to something larger than themselves.
It's very platonic, to use a phrase that was earlier, that there's things that we can't quite feel that cannot be looked at in a, you know, cannot be looked at in a microscope, but we know they're real.
We know love.
We know justice.
We know mercy.
We know kindness.
We know compassion is real.
And in fact, we need to build a society around that.
What the postmodernists and the post-structuralists have done post-1960s is they basically say if it's not material, if you can't see it in cause and effect, it's not real.
And that's a tragedy to believe.
And so, yes, the byproduct of that is, so you have two things happening at once.
America pulls back from its values that wants to find.
But then they kind of buried the lead.
In fact, they didn't incorporate it, which I just want to reiterate.
It is a fact that we are the most depressed, most suicidal, most anxious, most medicated, most alcohol-addicted in history.
Now, you might say, well, Charlie, that's causation and correlation.
Hard to say that they aren't connected.
Hard to say that if patriotism, religion, community involvement, having kids collapses, and all the negative indicators skyrocket, that there isn't some sort of relationship there.
Tom, what do you think needs to happen for a man to get on his knees and say, I need God?
What do you think needs to happen for that to take place to a nation?
Great crisis builds great response in the heart of any man.
After 9-11, you saw the unification of America in an amazing way.
Because whenever you have a great crisis, you will inherently point back to a great tenant or a great truth.
And what happened on 9-11, the great truth was nobody messes with the greatest country in the world, and I'm part of that, and I'm proud to be part of that.
And I'm coming together with my neighbors, and I'm upset about this, and I'm healing together, and I'm mourning together, and I'm angry together.
Together, the word together keeps coming.
In the age of moral relativism, as we see here, everybody's truth is okay.
So starting in 1968, 69, if you were to study that, there were about four things that came together that make it very understandable for a crack in the heart of the populace and the population.
One is, you know, you have the death of Bobby Kennedy, the death of Martin Luther King.
You've got the summer of love.
You've got the senseless, these people that believe the senseless sending to war of our young men.
If you didn't get into college, you're going to war, tough.
You know, if you manage to get into college, oh, so if your family could get you into college, you don't have to go to war.
Well, you know, talk to Al Gore and W about that.
They both took advantage of that privilege to stay out of the war.
And there was this crack that happened there.
You had the loss of these leaders.
You had also the loss of faith in the elders of the time because what was happening there and the great summer of love, where everybody thought, well, then all your truths will be okay.
That was well intended.
But what happened in the middle of that is if everybody's truth is okay, PBD, then there's no one ruler for standard for morals.
There's no one ruler for standards of what is patriotism, what is faith in America, or what is good, or what do we do for our community.
And suddenly, everybody's truth is okay, and you can't judge me becomes the boomerang that comes back.
The unintended consequences is you lose control of the whole thing.
And so I think great crisis is needed.
What will bring America back together?
And unfortunately, great crises are usually very painful in their own right.
Can I say that was really beautifully put.
I didn't even think about the college enrollment draft thing prior.
The issue, though, Patrick, is that if you have moral chaos, tyranny comes next.
And there's a totalitarian impulse that is running through our country.
We call it identity politics, political correctness.
Is that the answer to this will not be more freedom or more liberty in the short term?
It's that we're going to need instruments of meaning.
So then we're going to need somebody to tell you what to do, which is one of the reasons why I think this COVID fascism was accepted by so many Americans for so long.
And so you get strong leaders, quote-unquote, strong leaders, if the moral fiber of your country decays.
If I can just add to that, I believe everything you're saying is accurate.
I also think that there's sort of a messaging problem because you talked about the Joel Osteens of the world or even the Mark Wahlbergs of the world.
Who do you think is more likely to convert the everyday person to love America and to fear God again?
A Joel Osteen or a Mark Wahlberg type?
I would argue that you need this in the pop culture zeitgeist.
It's not going to take a religious leader or some sort of apostle that's going to convert everyday Americans and start loving Americans again or go to church more often.
It's not going to be a religious leader.
You see, the fastest growing religion in America these days is atheism and agnosticism, right?
And non-denominational or just non-believer.
So we need to, kind of like what you're saying, we need to make loving America again and American values and Judeo-Christian Christian values pop culture and cool again.
And until that's done, I think we're going to have the same conversation for years and years to come.
So my argument is that the American founding is the great rallying point.
I think that it's so beautiful.
It's so exceptional.
It's so rare in human history.
And it also, I think, people yearn to actually love the place they live in.
I know that's an unusual thing to say.
I think people actually want an excuse to love America.
And so I think the promise of the founding can be that great unifying.
That you could disagree on tax policy, disagree on immigration, but let's at least agree that these founders were on to something very big, bold, and beautiful.
And we're recipients from it.
And then understand what that is.
We can have a real conversation about that.
If I can get you, if I can give you one thing that if that's the answer, which it might be.
Okay, which it is.
So you remember the movie The Patriot?
Yeah, with Mel Gibson.
Mel Gibson.
By the way, he's a Christian.
We put a list.
I mean, talk about the Passion of the Christ.
Yeah, he's doing number two now.
Yeah.
But that movie, I don't know if that preceded Passion of the Christ.
It might have before.
And Braveheart, are you kidding me?
Yeah.
But that guy made loving America and fighting for America cool.
And in the pop culture.
So it's going to take something like that, kind of what I was saying in the pop culture, to make young Americans.
Gen Z 16% is not proud to be American.
You're not going to get them to start loving America by saying, hey, read the Declaration of Independence.
I acknowledge that.
I'm not even, trust me, try to get them to read the preamble to the Constitution, let alone the first paragraph of one of the course human events becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands that have timed them to another.
To get them to even read that, like, what does that even mean?
I'm talking about the eternal, compelling truth behind it, right?
That maybe, and if not, then we're a lot farther gone than I would like to believe.
But I totally agree.
I mean, Tom Cruise's Top Gun Maverick, praise God that that was the number one movie in the last year and a half.
I think that is evidence in my favor that people enjoyed kind of the pro-Americana vibe, right?
The kind of, you know, we're going to go up against the bad guys.
There was no bad guy.
Name the bad guy.
No, that's what was so interesting.
There was no country they didn't identify it.
Almost about America.
It was intentionally abstract almost, right?
And it was about rallying behind a team.
And it really didn't pander that much to identity politics.
I mean, it was a little bit throughout, but it was largely a movie that could have been made in the 80s or 90s, which is why it was so successful.
You know, you know what I think needs to happen.
This is my ideas, okay, on this.
First of all, for me, the enemy, if you study enemy, how it did whatever it did, it always divided.
If a person, today we're having a meeting upstairs, we're having a matter of meeting, and I said, the biggest challenge in a marriage, who's the biggest enemy in a marriage?
The biggest enemy is when the spouse becomes the marriage.
It's always better to have an external enemy than an internal enemy.
The worst type of enemy is the internal enemy.
We have internal enemies right now.
And the way they're doing it is they're going, they're so brilliant, dark, but brilliant.
They're going straight to the top of influence and they're crippling them.
Straight to the top.
But did you see what he did?
But did you see what she did?
But your parents, they don't know what they're doing.
Your parents don't care about you.
If your parents came out, they would probably judge you.
You know what?
This is how we are.
We are a little bit more disciplined.
So they're dividing to the point of influence, okay?
Whatever the influence is.
Now, Mel Gibson may be a guy who I can watch all day.
His movies, I think he's fantastic.
I think it's funny.
He can do funny.
I think he can do, you know, drama.
He can do anything.
Put him anywhere.
He's going to do great, right?
But I think you need to get somebody like the face of the NBA, the face of the NFL, the face of Hollywood.
Like, it needs to be a rock type.
It needs to be a Michael type, a LeBron type, a Brady type, a person like that that's willing to talk.
So if they're going to work that way to come and take the influence from the top, you got to go get some of the guys at the top.
So two things.
Mahomes is an outspoken Christian.
So that's a good start.
And I know for certain he loves America.
He's probably a conservative.
I don't want to out him here because he would lose a contract.
And boy, isn't that the case?
Is that they make harsh punishment swift if you defect from the regime party line?
And just look at what happens if you dare even step out of line a little bit.
You have to do these long apologies and you have to, I mean, look what they try to do to Rogan for even questioning some of the COVID stuff, right?
You got to stand up, though.
No, I agree with you.
I'm saying that the people too big to cancel, the Mahomes, and Brady is a right-winger.
I mean, he's a total pro-American conservative guy.
And he, you know, he's too big to cancel.
Now he's retired, so maybe he'll be able to speak out more.
But I completely agree.
I mean, Tiger Woods is a pro-American guy.
You know, he doesn't hate this country.
And I'm sure he doesn't stand for the BLM stuff.
There's a difference between being what you are and promoting it and driving it.
There's a big difference between being what you are and driving it and promoting it because other young kids are watching you to want to be converted.
Anyways, we got a lot of other stories I want to get into.
A few things, Tom.
I'm looking at Wall Street Journal today.
Top three stories.
Elon Musk has revived the idea of digital banking to turn Twitter into a company worth more than $250 billion, an aspiration that faces regulatory hurdles and challenge of entrenched players.
Second story: Tesla delivered a record number of vehicles in the three months of the year, first three months of the year, when the company slashed prices to stimulate demand in a cooling car market.
Okay.
Three, McDonald's is temporarily closing its U.S. offices this week as it prepares to inform corporate employees about layoffs undertaken by the Burger Giant as part of a broader company restructuring.
Tom, going to Elon Musk, operating those two companies, Tesla and Twitter, what are the likelihood you think?
Because right now, Twitter's what?
They came back, the shares, they're showing $22 billion valuation, whatever the number was.
A guy like this running two different companies, what's the likelihood of both of these things becoming a reality?
Meaning Tesla going to become the company he wants to build and Twitter become that quarter billion dollar company, quarter trillion dollar company.
Well, I look at his background, and if you told me that he was going to make those four companies successful, when you add, you know, space exploration and other things to it, I would have said you're crazy.
But I think this is this guy's just a special guy, and I think he's putting the teams around him.
He's been unafraid to call the herd at Twitter headquarters.
And I think both of these things are going to be a reality.
And he's not going to do it single-handedly.
And what he's doing right now is he is pulling back on Twitter and then building forward with the people that are with him.
And I think both of these things are absolutely going to be a reality.
And you have to remember where he's going with Twitter, it's not really a long path to that.
It's called the super app.
And we see people talking about the super apps that are available in Chinese, that do so many things.
Yeah, and that are also banking centers.
And I think he's been part of a past organization that comes to mind, I think, that was a pretty successful center of banking.
And I think what he's really talking about here is: I'm going to make Twitter a super app, and I'm also going to make Tesla successful.
And I believe him.
Did he come out and say that?
Did he want to make this into a super app?
He's talked about it before.
He's talking about it.
He said that before.
Yeah.
So a question for you, Charlie.
So imagine, what if?
Let's do three what ifs, okay?
What if Musk doesn't buy Twitter?
What if Spotify dropped Rogan?
What if there is no Rumble?
What would happen today if there weren't for those three companies?
We would be in a far, far worse spot than we are now.
Yeah, I mean, if Musk didn't buy Twitter, first of all, I wouldn't have been able to prove that I was on a Twitter blacklist because Elon put out the Twitter files and the do not amplify tag.
So that's number one.
Praise God, we have Ron.
Did you know that?
I did not know that.
Who else was on that list?
Dan Bongino that we know of.
It's actually my pinned tweet.
It says I was placed on Twitter's blacklist.
Wow.
You learned that just a few months ago weren't that Twitter files?
One of the Twitter files that was leaked and reported on by Barry Weiss showed that there was a specific threat assessment tag put on my Twitter account that said, quote, do not amplify on my account.
It was a shadow ban without a shadow ban.
So Jack Dorsey lied under oath in front of Congress.
So you weren't banned.
You just weren't amplified.
It said do not amplify.
Yeah.
To a day, I could show you because we used to have the fourth largest engaged Twitter account on the planet, according to Axios.
We were averaging about 135,000 retweets a day.
We really understood the harmony of the platform and we used it non-stop.
It's kind of how we made a name for ourselves.
And then, like, overnight, we went to 1,000 retweets a day.
And we now know why, because we were placed on a Twitter platform.
It's a big difference, by the way, from 135 to 1,000 retweets a day.
It's a scale of 100, right?
You saw the same thing on TikTok.
Pat saw the exact same thing.
Oh, they did the same thing as well.
Pat and I were talking to each other.
Do you remember the termination day where all of a sudden a bunch of followers disappeared?
Pat and I were on the phone call.
Pat, have you looked at your Twitter?
I just looked at mine.
I just lost 3,000 followers from yesterday to today.
And now you can go back and you can look at any of the trackers in here, you know, Social Blade or any of them, and you can screw it up.
But the point is, the fact that the point I want to move back to is go back.
I actually want you to think about it.
Let's try to paint a picture for the audience.
Musk doesn't buy Twitter.
Spotify drops Rogan.
Rumble isn't there to scare the crap out of YouTube saying, hey, if you abuse the talent, there's another option for them.
What does America look like if those three events don't happen?
It would look even more like East Germany, and we're looking like East Germany right now.
I mean, Rumble is one of our great hopes for free speech online.
Full disclosure, I'm a shareholder in Rumble.
I bought their stock, so I'm not pushing the stock.
I'm just saying what they're doing is a very, very magical thing to push back against the Leviathan that is YouTube.
If Spotify would have canceled Rogan, he probably would have landed on his feet.
He probably could have done his own thing, but it would have showed that we at Spotify will not allow any sort of dissident opinions or dissent.
I personally think Rogan might not renew his Spotify contract.
I would love to see him do his own thing and just send out his stuff.
I think he's big enough.
He's America's greatest podcaster.
He's super easy to listen to, fabulous interviewer, and just really interesting.
That's my own personal opinion.
I think he's bigger than Spotify.
In fact, I was one of the few people that think that Spotify underpaid him.
I think he's a billion-dollar talent.
I know that sounds wild, but he has so much power in the zeitgeist.
He's so good at what he does.
And not to mention, he can get any guest he wants at any time.
And he has a unique format.
So those three, those components, praise God that Twitter is now owned by Elon.
It's freer than ever before.
There's still a lot of work to do on the platform.
It still has sort of quirks.
And I don't like their new verification thing.
It drives me crazy that almost anybody can get verified, but that's just me.
I think it's kind of weird.
But speech online, believe it or not, in the last year, has become more free, not less free.
Of course.
It's one of the few things in society that's actually heading the right direction, which is why they have to try to get this Restrict Act passed.
The Restrict Act in DC, where they're saying it's going to ban TikTok, it's all nonsense.
What they're trying to do is create a precedent or a prerequisite to make speech less free online.
We, as people that love America and believe in dialogue and a free and open internet, have actually had a pretty good 18 months.
They're going to try to use the bipartisan hatred of TikTok as a way to try to ban Telegram, Rumble, and Twitter.
All three of them have foreign components.
Telegram was founded by a Russian.
Rumble was founded in Canada.
And Twitter has shareholders like the Saudis that own shares.
Under the Restrict Act, the Secretary of Commerce could ban all three based on what they're about to give the power to.
And it's probably going to pass, thankfully, because we're sounding the alarm on it.
It's the Patriot Act on steroids for social media companies.
Yeah, look, it's right there.
I mean, that's the actual, that's literally the quote.
And that's salon.com, which is a communist rag that even agrees with me.
I mean, I hate TikTok.
I think it's digital fentanyl.
But I think that we're going to have to live with TikTok being a thing, maybe sold to an American company and onshore.
That would be the best solution because giving DC unprecedented censorship authority in a time when the internet is becoming freer would be a big mistake.
You think TikTok should be banned?
Is that something?
In the ideal world, of course, yes.
But we have to also look in reality where you give DC a little bit of this power, they're going to use it to ban us in another way.
I think TikTok is bad for society and bad for humanity, but I don't always get what I want.
So I'd rather have a free open internet with this really bad app that hopefully can be onboard in America because they will try to use the same power to then restrict Telegram, Rumble, or Twitter.
But is there this yearning for this?
What act is it called?
The Restrict Act?
Oh, yeah, no, it has 21 co-sponsors.
Who's leading that?
Republicans and Democrats.
You can look at the co-sponsors.
There's more Republicans actually than Democrats sponsoring it.
Lindsey Graham, Shelly Moore Capito, Susan Collins.
You can go through all the co-sponsors.
John Thune is the main Republican.
Yep, there it is, John Thune, and then Tammy Baldwin from Wisconsin.
I'm super cynical and jaded.
Anytime you have mass bipartisan support for anything in D.C. means a lot of lobbyists are pushing for something that's probably going to be bad for the country and our freedom.
I hate to be so jaded, but that's just a general rule.
And there's exceptions, obviously.
I mean, there's some opioid stuff that's passing.
That's some good legislation.
This is confirmation of the rule, though.
This is an awful piece of legislation that would make our ability to speak online highly restricted because it's literally in the name, the Restrict Act.
So what could they do to companies?
So forget TikTok.
What could they do to a rumble?
What could they do to read the bill?
They could police our speech.
It is Patriot Act 2.0 using the guise of foreign adversaries, giving all the power to the Secretary of Commerce, who no one really knows who she is.
She's Gina Raimondo.
It's fine.
It could be anybody.
But effectively delegating that authority to say if there's any sort of foreign policy concern, we can then use that power to close down the app, restrict their activity, or monitor the activity.
And you could just imagine, and by the way, the people pushing this are the tech companies, Google and Facebook.
And I said, well, why would Google and Facebook push this?
Well, Google is being threatened via YouTube shorts with TikTok.
Facebook is being threatened on Instagram by TikTok.
But Facebook wants more than that.
Facebook would love to be able to ban Telegram because people would use WhatsApp.
This is all blatant cronyism disguised as a bipartisan bill to try to stop the CCP from mining our kids' data.
We should try to do something to fix that.
Make them onshore it, sell it to an American company.
The idea of giving the federal government censorship powers of a social media app, I think it's a really bad idea.
For me, it came down when I went to look at this, and I was expecting to see a five-page tariff, right?
Tariffs are usually three to five pages.
Aluminum shall be defined as aluminum, and it will have a 16% tariff.
And within five pages, you take care of it.
So I was expecting, Pat, to see five pages on this because of the threat posed by a foreign entity having access to personal information, including potential financial information of the American people, it shall be impugned, right?
That's the word you look for.
I was looking for five pages.
And all of a sudden, you're looking, this is hundreds.
Wait a minute.
Why do you need hundreds of pages to effectively put a negative tariff and to shut TikTok for the reasons of harvesting American information on foreign soil for nefarious means?
And then I looked into it and I said, wait a minute, this is a weaponization of government that is being advocated by today's corporate interests coming from Facebook.
What Facebook doesn't understand is there's an other side of the rock here because they're not going to be where they are forever, nor are their competitors going to be forever.
And they are one generation and a black swan from being on the receiving end of this thing.
Hundreds of pages.
It should be a five-page tariff.
The next concern we can get, this is wild because we saw what Patriot Act did.
It's a way of bullying the average person and going after anybody at any given time.
And I've had a chance to interview a lot of these mobsters.
It was done from a good standpoint to get them, you know, put them in jail.
And a lot of these guys at New York City was very happy, the fact that Rudy was able to do it.
But then that opened up a way for the government to say, man, we can really go after a lot of different people.
Go after Trump.
Everybody wants the Patriot Act to go after Trump as president.
Yeah, so let's talk about that.
What's going on right now with Trump?
I can pick any of these stories and read them.
Yeah, go ahead.
Trump rages about being indicted in social media posts about his indictment.
Says the U.S. is now a third world country.
You know, Donald Trump can still run for president after.
Yeah, I know, indicated.
I saw that indicated.
He wrote that.
Yeah, yeah.
Hey, if I was indicted, I wouldn't have my spelling very precise.
I think we got to give him a little bit of mercy.
So what are your thoughts about what's going on here?
What are your thoughts about what's going on here?
Oh, I mean, it's an outrage.
I mean, I called it something similar to a legal Pearl Harbor where this has never been done before.
We'll never forget that it's done.
And they're, first of all, they're directly interfering with an election.
You don't like Trump, beat him at the ballot box.
Why do you have to do it this way?
Second of all, this is not a felony.
What they've outlined, we haven't seen the indictment yet, so maybe I'll be corrected, but I don't think I will be in this way.
Based on all public reporting and all leaks from the grand jury, this is a paperwork area, era that might be a misdemeanor, might, and upgrade it to a felony.
While Alvin Bragg has downgraded 52% of previously classified felonies as misdemeanors.
So the trend in New York is not felonies.
We're going in a misdemeanor direction.
We're going to, you know, we're going to say that if you loot or if you burn or you steal or you do all these things, yeah, reduced by 52%.
That, yes, downgraded 52% of felony cases to misdemeanors compared to 39%.
So it's literally.
50% different.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so he's increasing it now.
And so there's a term for this.
I didn't come up with it.
It's Sam Francis called anarcho-tyranny, which is the basic things that the nation needs to do to keep yourself safe.
Holding murderers accountable, drug trafficking, arson, stuff that we all don't agree with.
That we're loosening the sentencing and the policing there, but we're increasing the tyranny for political favored crimes.
And so, of course, the political hit job, they're using this for political purposes.
But I think there's something a lot deeper here going on.
The real crime that Donald Trump committed was winning the 2016 election.
And we know this in the psychological literature, the power of trauma, right?
And we know about post-traumatic stress syndrome, PTSD.
It's not that different.
The left in New York, the New York City elite, were legitimately traumatized the night that Hillary Clinton was supposed to break that glass ceiling at the Kravitz Center.
And that has now become almost a psychologically defining event for them where they swore a blood oath seven years ago.
We're going to get you.
And no matter what, we're going to make you indicted in the same place that you stole that night from us.
Because Amy Coney Barrett and Kavanaugh and Gorsuch and all the successes that Donald Trump achieved was not supposed to happen.
So I think this is more a revenge than almost anything else.
It's petty, it's personal, it's pathological, and it's political.
Daily Mail says Trump doubles his lead in Republican primary, record-breaking, raising money.
People are coming out of supporting him.
Some people are saying no matter what, he's going to end up winning.
Story came out that they want him to be, he wants him to do 30 days in jail.
They're trying to get him to go due time.
For a gag order.
For a gag order.
Yes.
All of this stuff that's going on.
Now, here's kind of how I process this.
You know, if you go after someone's father and you kill someone's father, but he's got two, three surviving sons, it's game over.
Back in the days, if you took out a guy, you had to take out his sons because you did not want any revenge to be taking place.
Let's say you win with Trump.
Let's say they win with Trump and what they're doing.
Let's say they do.
How many people have they given birth to or waken up right now that are saying, now that you did this, watch to see what we're going to do 10, 20, 30 years from now?
Yeah, that's a rational argument.
And they don't think that way.
I mean, look, whatever you want to call it, the deep state, the elite left, taking out presidents by non-democratic means has been done before.
They did it to Nixon.
Right?
They attempted to do it to Clinton, and he survived because he made a deal, I think, with the national security state.
They've done this.
Obama was smart enough not to wage war on the security.
He did whatever the CIA wanted, whatever the FBI wanted.
And then they tried to do it to Trump three times.
First, with the Patriot Act precedent of the FISA court, which was completely unconstitutional, where James Comey and Peter Struckstroke-Smirk, they colluded together illegally to get a FISA warrant to spy on a sitting president's soon-to-be president's campaign and also then a sitting president and trap Michael Flynn, then the first impeachment over a phone call, then the second impeachment over January 6th.
I mean, this guy has been attacked at every possible non-democratic vector you can imagine because I think there is a fear that they will not be able to replicate what they did in 2020 again.
Whether you think it was fraud, which I certainly believe or not, we can all agree what happened in 2020 was unusual.
That's a fact.
The amount of mail-in ballots, the amount of private money from Zuckerberg, $400 million, drop boxes, kind of confusion.
No one really knew what was happening with COVID, and it was almost like the make-it-stop election.
I think there's a great fear that Trump might win in 2024, and we have to take him off the chessboard immediately.
Consequences be damned.
For someone like you, where you are, where I, by the way, these two screens, Jorge went down.
If you want to bring them back up, we don't see them.
So for someone like you, I was at your event when I was at the event, and I was watching some of the people saying, hey, $4 million, $2 million, $100,000, you know, half a million dollars.
And you saw some folks that said, hey, some of you are worried about wanting to give money because you're thinking, you know, Charlie's a part of a Trump camp or this or that.
And some of you are DeSantis people here.
Whether you are or you're not, you know, he is doing some values that are good for you.
How are you positioned right now to be where you are?
You got Trump.
It's a very complicated position you're in because, you know, the smile on your face says a story because on one side.
It's never a dull moment.
Yeah, it's never a dull moment, but you're in a pickle here yourself.
So how do you maneuver around a situation like this?
Yeah, I try to be as clear as possible.
First, Turning Point USA, the crux of what we do is educational.
It's 501c3, no political at all.
By law, we have to stay out of politics.
High school campuses, college campuses, Turning Point Academy, TPUSA Faith, Young Women's Leadership Summit, thousands and thousands of members.
That's going to remain strong and growing and one of the largest organizations in the country, praise God.
And then there's Charlie Kirk personally.
I've endorsed Trump in 2024.
I don't like his attacks on DeSantis.
I don't support them because I actually like Governor DeSantis a lot and I want him to be successful.
But when I'm clear to my donors about this, you know, we've lost, I'd say, probably 10 or 12 major donors saying, I don't like the factor behind Trump.
I'm like, well, I'm sorry.
Let me tell you why.
First, he was a great president.
Secondly, I want you to understand that Charlie Kirk and the turning point machine would not exist if it was not for how generous Donald Trump was to us throughout the years.
Patrick, I was 24 years old sitting in the Oval Office as a non-college graduate, getting invited on Air Force One.
If I would forget that, I mean, I would be the most ungrateful, short-sighted person to turn my back on the man who believed in me when I was not nearly as, you know, let's just say successful or popular as I am today.
And so I have an obligation to him in the best possible way.
I don't want to be one of those people that benefits and turns the back.
And I also have something to say about that.
A lot of people talk about Trump's negatives.
I hear about it all the time.
But he has some virtues, some great virtues.
He works relentlessly.
I've never seen someone with as much energy as him.
He loves the country.
He's amazingly patriotic.
He's very creative.
And honestly, he was a fabulous president.
And you might not have liked the tone, but look at where America was when he was president and the garbage that's going on now.
It's a pretty easy choice.
So what you just said is the loyalty.
You're staying loyal to him when he was loyal to you.
Yes.
And I also think he was a great president, and I believe in his ideas.
I respect that.
Now, what do you say to people that say, well, that's great, Charlie?
We respect that.
But that's exactly what his problem is with Ron because he thinks without himself, Ron would have never won.
And that is why some people from MAGA believe that he is disloyal, unlike you.
What do you say to those people?
So what you're asking is, what do I say to people that say that Trump gets mad at Ron because he's disloyal?
Yeah, no, so I'll have a conversation.
I'll say, listen, guys, there's a reason why I'm in Florida.
I mean, I lived in LA for 20-some years, and I lived in Dallas for five years.
We're in Florida.
We're in Florida because we watched all the governors during COVID, what they did.
Ron crushed it.
We felt like this is the place we're going to build a media headquarters.
We moved out here.
Kids, values, principles, all of that, we felt good here, right?
And the beach in Florida is much better than the beach in Texas.
I don't know if you've seen the beach in Texas.
You're exactly.
I love this state, by the way.
Florida and DeSantis has done a fabulous job.
He's done a phenomenal job, right?
So then you'll have conversations with some folks, and they'll say, you know, look, DeSantis should run 2028.
He shouldn't run 2024.
He should just not even go in.
You know, he should wait till 2028.
This is a Trump thing to do.
And Trump is upset because he's not announced that he's not running.
He's kept it open.
He's written the book, the playbook of writing a book, go out there and do a couple interviews, Pierce Morgan, all this stuff.
This is a sign of this guy's about to run.
So this is why some of the people from the Trump camp are saying he would be much better if he stayed out.
Possibly.
I see it both ways.
Let me, because I'm friends with both of them.
First of all, it is a true statement that Ron DeSantis would not have been the Republican nominee without Trump.
He was down 30 points to Adam Putnam in the polls.
Putnam had all the, I think it's Adam Putnam is the name.
He raised all the money.
He was Chamber of Commerce selected.
And DeSantis got the endorsement and he became the nominee.
There's a lot of truth to that.
And so Trump understandably feels like, hey, man, like, I really helped you here, right?
Look at the headline of the Tampa Bay Times.
This is a left-wing paper.
Fueled by Trump, Ron DeSantis easily beats Adam Putnam despite $37 million spent on the primary, more than twice what DeSantis did, right?
So there's a lot of truth to that, and people forget that, okay?
Now, at the same time, though, DeSantis is his own man, and he's been a great governor with his own record, and he's done an unbelievably good job.
And so Trump started him on his legacy there.
But it's kind of an interesting thing, right?
It's like, I kind of made you who you are.
Wait your turn.
And DeSantis said, ah, well, you got me past the primary, but you didn't make me a good governor, right?
And so that's DeSantis' claim.
Here's where I come down on it, though.
My advice to Ron DeSantis would be, as of right now, you will not be the nominee.
Trump is gaining support.
This indictment helps him.
It validates every core argument that Trump has, which is the system is against me.
Therefore, I'm such a threat, they're going to try to take me out.
In a Republican primary, you know, that plays really, really well.
I'm still an outsider.
I'm still an outsider, right?
Even though I'm the former president running as a rebel, right?
So it helps him tremendously.
But I personally don't want to see a nasty primary, but I don't get what I want.
It's going to be a nasty primary.
I'm going to try to referee it the best I can as friends with both of them, also wearing a MAGA hat throughout it as Trump 2024 with my commitment to his candidacy and what he wants to do for the country.
But if Ron DeSantis wins, if Ron DeSantis runs, he'll raise a bunch of money, and I hope, you know, will elevate the discourse.
And if and when he loses, which I believe he would lose to Trump, I hope he endorses him.
Question for you.
This is the last question on this one.
No, I'm happy to go.
This one, this one.
So if you were him, and you beat Putnam $37 million to half, you didn't have the money that you raised.
Trump comes in and endorses you.
Would you even signal that you're running or would you come out and say, I'm not running this time around?
What would you do if that was you?
I'd probably run because there's this kind of big shadow of a very big man, Chris Christie, of the man who never ran.
And he was supposed to be president in 2012.
You might remember he was kind of like the darling of the Republican Party.
And, you know.
Then he hugged Obama.
And by the way, you know what's crazy?
I think it's going to be tough for Christie to cross that bridge.
The bridge might be a little bit different.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, it might not hold his weight.
And so I'm sorry, that's mean, but it's so true.
I mean, he's like 200 pounds overweight.
You've really lost the weight.
It's not that hard.
Just like stop eating carbs.
And so anyway, that kind of shadow is folklore in the conservative world.
I hear it all the time because Christie was a popular governor who won an estate that previously was not as favorable.
And so I think if I was there in politics, the rule is it's better to run and lose than to not run at all and be forgotten.
It's like it's better to love and lost than never to have love and loss.
Charlie, this is why people like you, though.
Okay, so you're in a tough spot here.
I had no idea what direction you were going to go, by the way, when I asked those questions because you're being super loyal to the man who helped you during a time where you're 24 years old, Oval Office, all these things that you're talking about, you're trying to get your business going.
And then, you know, it is where it's at today.
But you're maintaining a good relationship with DeSantis.
And you're saying if you had to be in his position, you would still run.
Correct.
So in a way, but at the same time, you are wearing the MAGA 2024 hat.
So Rahm Emanuel said the same thing to Obama in 04 where he's like, hey, you got all this momentum after the DNC speech.
What are you going to do?
Like, what's the likelihood that another moment like this is going to happen to you?
You're going to be forgotten about.
And the resume DeSantis has the last two and a half, three years of what he did under COVID.
It's impressive.
It's more than impressive.
It's number one on the leadersbully.
That's correct, yes.
But that doesn't mean anything to the fact that this guy named Donald is going to come at him in ways he's never experienced before.
And it might toughen him.
Remember, Ronald Reagan ran multiple times for the Republican presidential nomination before actually being the nominee.
Ronald Reagan primaried a sitting president.
We forget this.
Gerald Ford, the unelected president, only one in American history.
He primaried him in 1976 and almost won the nomination, brought it to the convention floor.
And then Gerald Ford won in kind of an inside deal.
And then Ronald Reagan, of course, won the nomination in 1980 and won a landslide election.
And so you asked me a very specific question: if I was him.
And so I gave you a specific answer.
It's better to run and lose than not run and be forgotten.
Will he lose?
Oh, yeah.
Trump will, I mean, absent a black swan event or massive amounts of Republican primary voters, you know, changing their worldview in the next nine months, which I don't think is exactly going to happen.
I have a really good pulse of the grassroots in the conservative grassroots.
They love Trump.
This indictment has made them furious.
They're ready for action, and they look at Donald Trump as a symbol more than a man.
He is a symbol of abuse of the powerful.
The powerful coming after the normal person and abusing them.
Now, Trump is not a normal person.
He's a billionaire, but he's become kind of this larger-than-life martyr where people who get fired because their factory went to China or somebody that gets terminated because they said something politically incorrect.
Trump is a now manifestation of the powerful using their powerful unjustly.
You might disagree with that representation, but it's how millions of Republican primary voters view it.
How much does this infuriate a Hillary Clinton that she wishes she had this kind of a following and this kind of a admiration that she just cannot get?
How much does this irritate her?
I mean, I could do a whole hour on Hillary Clinton.
Yeah, she's a very broken person.
And Donald Trump largely broke her.
Her whole life was about becoming president.
Her whole life.
From when she went to Maniast High School in Chicago, when she went to Wellesley, her whole life was in preparation.
Her marriage to Bill Clinton, what a con that was, right?
From her running the bimbo squad for Bill, which was literally the same thing that they're indicting Donald Trump for.
Bill Clinton had a whole operation, a whole team.
You could look it up, Bimbo Squad, where they just went and they went to women that Donald Trump had, not Donald Trump, that Bill Clinton had sex with, and then they would just do NDA after NDA after NDA.
And it was well known in the 90s, and people forget about it.
Yep.
See, Giuliani says Clinton's in Ployda Bimbo Squad.
You go down politico.com, 2016.
Yes, Hillary was an enabler, right?
She was the chief architect.
She was the Michael Cohen of Bill Clinton's NDA operation in the 90s.
And look, I'll be very honest.
I don't love the argument, well, Democrats do those crimes, and why should Republicans be applied?
Because I just think it's overdone.
In this case, it's actually a good argument, which is that Bill Clinton mastered the private payoff NDA.
Like, he was the best at it.
He would go sleep with a woman.
She would go threaten to go to the news.
And then he would throw the bimbo squad and settle for $100,000, right?
They never indicted him.
And by the way, while we're talking about people's sexual behaviors, can we have maybe a grand jury impaneled for Bill Clinton getting on Jeffrey Epstein's plane and going down?
Because I guess former presidents are now, you know, completely fair game.
It's also one side of the aisle, right?
This is the both sides on the well, no, no, no.
Trump never went to the island.
That is not true.
Trump and Epstein hated each other.
There's a lot of misinformation.
Netflix did a lot of damage here.
Trump kicked Epstein out of the club.
He never went to the island.
There's no evidence he ever engaged in the Epstein's nonsense.
In fact, he kicked Epstein out because he was preying on young women.
Bill Clinton did go to the island.
Dershowitz went to the island, and maybe some other people.
That's what we know of.
But Trump never went to the island.
It's so funny that this whole thing takes place and nobody is willing to open it up and go deeper to see what really happened there.
You know, who do we have on a couple months ago who talked about the Epstein Island?
Rob, who do we have on?
What was her name?
She was Whitney Webb, which, by the way, she did a phenomenal job, and she can't even live in the States.
They loved what she had to say.
What's the likelihood that we'll ever, in our lifetime, learn about what happened on Epstein Island and any of the guys that will be held accountable for it?
What's the number below zero?
You really think it's not going to happen at all?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, so my hypothesis on Epstein, he was an intelligence asset, either for the American government or for the Israelis.
He had a Potemkin village of an investment facade.
Anyone that met him, there's a very powerful YouTube video.
Eric Weinstein talks about this in detail.
So this is not my theory.
He talks about it.
He says, when I sat down with Jeffrey Epstein, and it makes sense because he had the most expensive real estate and he wasn't that sophisticated.
And we talked about investments, and there were not a lot of recorded trades on the addresses he disclosed for his financial activity.
And he only had one investor, and it's all very strange, right?
But it makes sense that if you were trying to run an intelligence operation, either for the Saudis or for the Israelis or for the American government, that you would try to get the most powerful people in compromising situations, the underage girls, capture it on film, and then be able to use it for blackmail.
So I don't know all the details, but you're dealing with something that's deeper than just kind of a high society pimp.
That's essentially what Whitney Webb did point out.
It wasn't even necessarily Epstein, it was his right-hand woman, Jelaine.
That her father was undoubtedly some sort of asset from the Massad.
And he owned newspapers and Rupert Murdoch and him went out of the world.
Robert Maxwell, I think his name was.
Yeah, that's exactly his name.
Robert Maxwell, yes.
So you're saying less than 0%, right?
The fact that we find out what actually happened on the island, it's not going to happen.
Who would lead that charge, though?
You know, you see a January 6th committee or 9-11 committee.
I mean, that's advocating for that.
Only one person could be.
No, no, no.
It's like a, what do you call these Wikileaks guy?
Julian Assad.
Julian Assange.
It's got to be something.
It's got to be somebody like that.
And you've got to be living in a different place to pull it off and hack into it and gather the community because they have communicated.
So there's some way somebody can get to the island, too.
That's right.
Bill Gates went to the island.
I'm sorry.
I forgot.
But Bill Gates went to fix the Microsoft Outlook email for Epstein because he was having problems.
And it wasn't just the island.
It was this massive ranch in New Mexico, too.
Right?
Huge ranch that underage girls were trafficked to.
And remember, this wasn't just American government officials.
Prince Harry, right?
Is that it?
No, not Harry.
Not Prince Harry.
Prince Edward.
Randy Andy.
Yeah.
Prince Andrew.
And they call him and get him.
I got him all Harry.
I get him all Prince Andrew.
No, no, Harry is from Santa Barbara.
Yeah, Prince Andrew was also part of Epstein's orbit.
So did you see, just to bring up Harry, if you want to recognize them, they're non-profit.
They have to prove how many hours a week they contribute to a non-profit.
You know how many hours they have to prove?
Did you see it?
One hour a week.
Nice.
That's hard work.
$11 million, I believe they've raised.
What's the $13 million they've raised?
They've given $3 million, and they contribute an hour a week to their charity.
That's some hardworking people right there.
Louis, one final thing on the Epstein thing.
I don't mean to belabor the point, but when I first started to go to Palm Beach and I visited Palm Beach 10 years ago, I started to hear kind of one-off comments about, oh, yeah, that house right there, that's Jeffrey Epstein, and he's trafficking young girls.
People knew in the area.
You were 19 at the time.
I was 19, 20 years old.
They would just casually point this out.
No, it was a matter of fact.
Because remember, Epstein was indicted like 15 years prior for similar activity.
So it was kind of out there, right?
Yeah.
I think it was Acosta, actually, that was the U.S. Attorney General who ended up being one of Trump's cabinet officials that was the U.S. Attorney.
I could be wrong about that, but there was some connective tissue there.
And anyway, no one really took it seriously.
And then I remember it was either Rogan or somebody in 14 or 15 before all this started to talk about Epstein's island.
And you were smeared as a conspiracy theorist.
If you would have said in 15 in public decent society that there was a targeted campaign with former presidents and the world's richest man, who Bill Gates was at the time, to go to a remote island in the Caribbean to go be able to have sexual relationships with underage girls, you would have been laughed out of the room.
Now we know that's a fact.
Why do I say that?
Be careful what you call a conspiracy theory.
It's a thought-terminating cliché that actually might lead you to something true.
By the way, Rob, I'm going to send this to you.
I love what you just said.
I'm going to send this to you.
Can you pull this up from APA News?
Because a lot of times you hear things like this, and you're like, well, you know, there are a lot of conspiracy theorists out there, and you're seeing right now a lot of conspiracy theorists saying, you know, we're undefeated.
All these things came true.
You know, we were right.
Exactly.
But look at the article.
It's not written by Breibart.
If you open this up and you go to it, conspiracy theory, okay, coined long before JFK assassination.
Go lower to take a look at the article.
Okay, claim.
The terms, conspiracy theories, were created by CIA agency follow-on.
APS assessment.
False recorded use of the phrase conspiracy theory dates back to 1863 and it was notably invoked reports following the 1881 shooting then President James Garfield more than 60 years before the CIA was established.
An academic review of the digital library found the term conspiracy theorists has been published at least in the last what do you say to someone like this where they're quick to jump on it to say CIA didn't come up with the conspiracy theory.
You mean that they're calling it a conspiracy theory?
Yeah.
Conspiracy theory came from the CIA.
Go read the Church and Pike documents.
The Church and Pike Committee was the most effective House and Senate oversight of the U.S. intelligence agencies.
They received death threats.
They were followed and intimidated.
They came up with it.
So it's not like we pulled it out of thin air.
The Church and Pike Committee discovered not just the heart attack gun, which is a real thing, by the way.
They discovered a gun that they could shoot somebody and make it look like they had a heart attack, fake an autopsy, but they discovered that the Central Intelligence Agency via Operation Mockingbird, a real thing, used the term conspiracy theory and got it into public opinion as a way to try to discredit dissident opinion.
It's in the Church and Pike documents, so people can read it for themselves.
The Church and Pike Committee was, what year did it was it, 70 something?
Yeah, if I'm not mistaken, 76, right?
Yeah, I mean, it's all there.
The thousands of pages of documents that most Americans aren't even aware of.
You'll learn more about your government.
COINTELP, I can never pronounce it right, Cointel Pro, Operation Mockingbird.
There's five or six of these projects that the intelligence agencies are running that the Pike Committee uncovered.
In your opinion, all this conspiracy theory stuff, what turned out to be the biggest non-conspiracy theory?
Epstein's up there.
And what do you think is actually a conspiracy theory that Americans like, hey, sorry to break it down.
Lie versus truth is about.
Yeah, I hear what you're saying.
Go ahead.
Well, I mean, there's several.
I mean, one of the ones we lived under in the last couple of years was that somehow closing schools and getting kids away from each other is somehow going to stop the spread of the virus.
And if you push back against it, you're anti-science and you're believing in conspiracy theories, right?
That's a really big one.
How about that the vaccine is safe and effective and going to stop transmission?
I mean, they say.
My mom got diagnosed with COVID today.
She had every booster on the planet.
So, I mean, that was today.
I'm like, how are you feeling, mom?
COVID.
Yeah.
Out of nowhere.
I think there's a lot to the JFK assassination.
I personally believe there was more than one shooter.
I think there's a lot of evidence to support that.
We don't know that for a fact because they keep on suppressing the release of those documents.
I think that this idea that somehow we got off a metallic-based currency just for good and noble reasons, I think is insane.
Just read The Creature of Jekyll Island, which is, I think, one of the most illuminating books on currency stuff.
Pat took his whole team to Jekyll Island at one point, didn't you?
Yeah, we had it in the room where they came up with the whole thing.
We had a meeting there.
So anyway, I could go on and on.
But no, I mean, there are several of them.
How about this?
When we used to say that there weren't weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, we were all called conspiracy theorists.
Turns out there weren't.
They found some biological and chemical agents, but nothing near what they told us it was, right?
Which was kind of the core centerpiece of, I think, the illegal mistake to invade Iraq, one of the worst mistakes in American history.
So what's on the flip side?
What do you mean?
Meaning, like, what actually probably is a conspiracy theory?
Oh, man, you got to.
Did we land on the moon?
Is the earth round?
Yes, we do have a spherical rounder.
Yes.
Yes, that is correct.
You could prove it.
And you could prove it mathematically.
You could prove it flying in a plane.
You could prove it when you see a boat that all of a sudden just disappears on the horizon.
That's how you know you live on a spherical rounder.
Those are the dragons over the edge.
Yeah, that's right.
That's why we have to carve the goddess in the front of our boat to protect us.
How about the moonland?
You think we landed on the moon?
Yeah, I do.
I think we landed on the moon.
And the reason being is that, look, I don't have any, I'm going to get so much hate mail for this, and that's fine.
But generally, that one seemed too big to cover up.
That there would take too many people and too many actors and too many fake stories.
And I think there was a really good mythbusters that actually went against the kind of flag waving part of it.
Again, I don't.
What about 9-11?
I do not think it was an inside job.
I think our government probably had aforementioned notice.
Yeah, I think our government probably knew that 9-11 was going to happen.
They had ignored intelligence reports.
There's too much to suggest that we allowed the hijackers into our country, and we did nothing to stop it.
So you do think it was an inside job?
That's not an inside job necessarily.
An inside job would say that the government was actively planning explosives and wanted it to happen.
I think that there was probably a turn of the head on, for whatever reason, you could figure it out, and we probably will one day, of some sort of domestic attack that the Islamic fundamentalists were plotting or planning.
But I think it goes too far to say that our government was planning explosives in the World Trade Center.
I don't see any evidence of that.
I want to read a couple other stories here.
So we can keep going into my opinions.
Crisis, crisis, crisis.
Like, you know, we talked earlier about what's going to happen, what needs to happen for America to be united.
We talk about different crises.
This is one of the ones that, you know, a lot of people are calling me about and asking me, what do you think about what's going to happen here?
And it's coming up a lot lately.
China and Brazil strike deal to ditch the U.S. dollar.
This is a zero-hedge story.
And, you know, they have reached a deal to trade in their own currencies, bypassing the U.S. dollar.
This deal will allow the two countries to conduct their massive trade, which amounts to $150 billion per year in financial transactions directly, exchanging one for Riases, vice versa.
This deal is part of Beijing's latest move against the U.S. dollar, extending its bilateral U.S. dollar attempting currency arrangement beyond countries such as Russia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, to now include Latin American exporting powerhouse.
While we are still strong, long away from the one replacing the U.S. dollar as a global reserve currency, the current U.S. ruling regime is destroying the world's faith and confidence, not only in the dollar, but in what was once a superpower in and is increasingly a third world banana republic.
Tom.
So I think what most people need to understand, and this is where I think Americans need to step back off headlines and just learn something very, very quickly.
And that is 1944, there was something called Brenton Woods.
And that's where the U.S. dollar was tied to gold.
In other words, the value of the U.S. dollar was connected to the value of gold.
And between Fort Knox and other areas, we had gold reserves.
So the U.S. currency on a global scale was deemed as being valuable, tied to gold, and stable.
And in 1944, everyone came to this agreement to say, hey, let's peg the value of our currency to the dollar because the dollar is pegged to gold and it brought international global stability.
It also created the dollar as the world's reserve currency.
Well, what does that mean?
That means if you have extra reserves and you bought them in dollars, they were stable because they were tied to the gold.
Now, Nixon, and we can talk about what you just referenced a minute ago, was Nixon taking us off the gold standard 72, 73, which had nothing to do with the Vietnam War and political instability in the economy at that time.
It was deeper.
I'm with you.
It was deeper reasons.
That was the front excuse.
Right now, you know what the average is right now on world reserves?
62% of countries' reserves are held in U.S. dollars.
62% right now.
And so even though we went off the gold standard, we're the reserve currency.
So people see the United States currency as very stable.
That's what's important.
And what we're seeing here is the wand.
Everybody here is the wand.
Well, that's a unit of measure.
The actual currency in China is called the reninbi.
That's their dollar.
Dollar equals reninbi.
Won is like a unit.
And so what they want is they want to slowly, remember, China plays a long game.
They want to slowly replace the dollar as the world's reserve currency.
Will they succeed?
Huh?
Will they succeed?
Well, they're taking one step at a time, and they're starting with African nations that they put into, by the way, you can also go study mercantilism where you come in and you take all the resources and then you sell them back things that are made out of the resources.
So China is in an active state right now of assisting many small regional Latin American and African nations on deals that are intentionally going to go bad and then leave them with the collateralization of the country they've just pillaged.
And so long term, if somebody doesn't stand up long term, sure, China could be successful because they're playing this not the way the West plays it.
The West has played the game in terms of history, in terms of regimes, a regime of leadership.
China is playing this long term in terms of decades.
Dynasty.
So Tom, Tony, what do you think?
Yeah, I don't mean to interrupt.
I agree.
I think the dollar, it's going to hit a flat line because Germany, South Korea, and Japan are not going to drop the dollar as a world reserve currency.
And especially Germany and Japan, they produce a lot of value and a lot of wealth.
And so the Euro backstopping the world reserve currency, meaning the dollar being the backstop of the Euro is actually in our benefit.
But India is going to be the big question, right?
If India falls, that's a growing market.
Brazil is a totally corrupt country.
They're a broken country.
The bulls on Brazil have been wrong the last 20 years.
It's like a trillion-dollar GDP.
You could fact-check me on it.
They're mainly a natural resource hub, and they have a real hard time with their own homegrown industry.
And there was like $1.6 trillion.
I was about right.
It's actually flatlined and gone down in recent years.
So the bulls on Brazil have been wrong.
And with Lula now becoming president, they're going to become a wholly owned colony of the Chinese Communist Party.
Basically, that's what catastrophic for the nation.
It's terrible.
The future of Brazil is put in permanent jeopardy because of Bolsonaro not staying as president, prime minister.
And everybody thought BRIC through the 90s was just an acronym for emerging nations.
Brazil, Russia, India, China.
It wasn't.
It was a coalition over there that wanted to undermine U.S. authority on a global trade basis.
So we need a new president because I don't think Joe Biden seems awfully worried that the dollar is no longer becoming the world reserve currency.
You can say that it wasn't a good idea for us to become the world reserve currency.
However, it's a fact that if we stop being the world reserve currency, every single person in America gets significantly poor overnight.
The fact that people have to turn their goods and services into dollars is kind of a stimulus boost just baked into our economy.
We're kind of a place of last resort, a refuge, if you will.
It's a built-in advantage that we don't even recognize or realize until we travel the world.
But I think we have more staying power than people realize.
There's a lot of entrepreneurs.
We create a lot of value in this country as some very valuable companies, despite the fact that we're service-based.
We still have a lot of natural resources.
We have a manufacturing beast that can still be unleashed if necessary.
So we have a lot of advantages.
With that being said, though, this current administration seems unbothered by any of this.
And I mean, what we need is a new regime.
You're right.
We do think in time in terms of the regime, hopefully it's President Trump.
And we go directly after the CCP.
But a lot of this is centered on a border dispute on eastern Ukraine.
All of this is, if that was not happening the way it was happening, a lot of these chips would not be falling into place, in my opinion.
That is the beginning domino because then Russia said, okay, screw you.
We're going to go closer to China.
You know, we're no longer, for the first time ever, Russia has just dropped basically all their dollars out of the central bank because we made them when we put sanctions on them.
By the way, what does that say for world reserve currency status?
This is why our leaders are so stupid.
We basically confiscated the dollars out of the Russian central bank.
That's not exactly safe and secure.
Basically, countries are saying, wait a second, you could just confiscate our dollars.
We went after them and just grabbed the dollars and said, yep, they're no longer valid, converted into ruples.
And Russia said, okay, well, that's an act of war, which it is.
And so I think a lot of this is centered on this Eastern border dispute.
We could talk about that if you'd like.
I think it's incredibly important.
I don't think people have really thought through the ramifications of our involvement in Ukraine.
And then when Xi comes over and says, hey, I have a plan B for you in this currency thing.
Tell you what, let's take something really valuable.
I've got it.
Energy.
Yeah, that's it.
I need energy, and energy has a hard unit of value coming out of the ground, just like gold does.
And so what Xi did is he got value in the form of resources for the Reminby in a deal that looks like a trade deal, but it's a currency deal with Russia.
That's right.
Yeah, it's bad all across the board.
But make no mistake, with the proper president, the right president, we can crack that alliance in nine months.
These countries, China has a lot of domestic problems.
Okay, you're saying that.
So Trump gets a, let's just say it's 2024.
He wins.
What's he doing?
Well, first, he could go back to what we already had, which is you have a peace immediately brokered in eastern Ukraine, immediately.
You go in there and you end this stupid war.
You end this proxy war.
You then try to create intentional separation between Russia and China and keep them in their own corners.
You go to the Saudis and you say, knock it off.
You're going to keep on using the dollar for the petrodollar.
You save OPEC, which will increase the dollar strength as a world reserve currency.
And then you have to go after the CCP in like a 15-point targeted plan.
You pull their visas from being able to go to Europe.
You put targeted sanctions on them.
Again, I'm not exactly saying anything that hasn't been thought through through really serious scholars, but we have to have a serious plan to punish the CCP for what they did with the virus, covering it up and lying about it.
And then also their hyper-aggressive action with Belt and Road, cyber warfare, infiltrating the American economy.
Some of that comes with a price and a cost.
But then more than anything else, Trump, if he becomes president again, will be energy independent again.
There'll be economic confidence restored.
I think that we'll see inflation put under control because we'll actually have a rebirth of market stability.
Right now, people are confused.
They're uncertain.
They're afraid of their own shadow.
Everyone's looking at what the central bank is doing.
Entrepreneurs can't operate in an environment like this.
And that's why you're seeing business startups go down.
You're seeing acquisitions slow down.
Whether we're in a recession or not, I think we are in a recession.
It really is an indictment of the lack of confidence coming from the current regime.
We don't know if a big tax bill is going to be passed.
We don't know if the regulators are going to be thrown at us.
We need President Trump to do what he did for four years, which is to unshackle the American economy.
Can I ask you a question?
Don't leave out Taiwan is that the question between China and Taiwan is market share of semiconductors.
This got nothing to do with righting or wrong of Chiang Kai-shek.
Yeah, that's correct.
That's why we should build as many domestic semiconductor plants as possible.
This is not lost on Donald J. Trump, and Taiwan will not happen that.
Taiwan won't happen that way.
They have to be able to do it.
And they know it.
And they know it.
It's the old Portuguese name for it.
Yeah, my question to you Charlie is this.
I'm glad you brought up the acronym BRIC, which I think has now been updated to BRICS because Brazil, Russia, India, China, and now South Africa is now the latest company.
The money is mighty proud of South Africa.
All facetiousness right there.
I don't mean to make fun of South Africa.
It's not exactly a world power.
Elon Musk is going to be very upset when he hears you commenting on his native country.
I think the country would agree.
He's an African American, but natural.
Here's my question.
I don't think there was anything like China was going to do this regardless.
We know that they've been trying to come after the American superpower, and that's just what's on their agenda, China 2030.
Russia was never going to cozy up to America.
They're always going to be aligned with China in some regard.
My question is, India.
I don't think China and India are aligned whatsoever.
They're not natural partners.
They're not natural powers whatsoever.
They hate each other, actually.
Exactly.
So what's their role in this?
Because I always thought that they, as the most populated democracy in the world outside of America, where is India's role?
Not that you're just the India-Pacific expert, but you seem to have a very good precinct.
Look, I mean, India is a tricky country.
You can't trust their government.
They're doing deals with Iran, and they're doing all sorts of weird stuff for energy.
But India should be the most natural partner and hedge.
You could squeeze China through a bilateral agreement with Korea, Japan, and India.
And that's why America needs to be actively involved in the room and calling balls and strikes, using sanctions and tariffs where necessary, and using the global reserve currency status to be able to effectuate meaningful geopolitical change, which of which we do not have right now.
I disagree a little bit.
I think Russia's run by a bunch of thugs and mobsters.
I think Russia wants whatever is best for Russia.
I don't think necessarily Russia and China are these natural partners.
I think we made it that way.
I think what Donald Trump was trying to do was he was trying to keep Russia in some sort of a kind of ambiguous middle neutral area phase and then jab at China.
Remember, Trump put sanctions on China.
He improved a lot of diplomats to be expelled from China.
He was putting a lot of different, he was trying to kind of create some form of a jab against the CCP.
The problem right now is the CCP is able to run undeterred right now.
There is no counterbalance from America.
So, I mean, look, for example, if we had an actual regime that cared about saving America, like, okay, China, you're going down to Brazil to go do a new deal.
15% export now tariff immediately on pick your product.
Just make them feel it a little bit.
A little bit of, you know, make them think twice.
So there's no cost to it.
And look, China has a lot of domestic problems.
They have hundreds of millions of people living in legitimate third world poverty, despite the appearance that Xi Jinping puts on, like he's the most popular leader ever.
There's legitimate dissent against the CCP.
The CCP is run by a group of mobsters and thugs with no more than 5% of the popular support.
And so they got their own ticking time bomb.
They have ghost cities.
They manipulate their currency.
They have bank runs that happen far too often.
They suppress a lot of the news there.
They're not a free society.
They think they can kind of do this Marxist-Orwellian digital surveillance state.
I actually think that's unsustainable.
I think it's going to break eventually.
I could be wrong.
And so China likes to posture as this really strong man.
We could destabilize the Chinese Communist Party in nine months with a proper president.
The question is, do we want to?
The only question then is why don't we?
It's because they've captured our elites.
And they call it elite capture in actually Mandarin.
They have purchased the head of the NBA.
They purchase Wall Street.
They purchase the top people.
Peter Schweitzer put this in his book, Red Handed, where he talks about how the American elites are bought and paid for by the CCP.
There's a great expression in Mandarin, and it's roughly translated, little bad talk, big help, which means they might talk a bad game against China, but they're a big act of help.
You can look at the cover, he has Elon Musk on there, which I think is a little unfair, but he has Joe Biden, John Boehner, Nancy Pelosi, LeBron James, I think that's Henry Kissinger, and then Bill Gates, all of which who benefit tremendously from the Chinese Communist Party.
And then you see what happens when a famous American actor like John Cena steps out of line.
Yep, immediately put back into place.
Mandarin.
Or the NBA was regulating who could wear things in the stands of free Hong Kong protester shirts.
Remember that?
It's kind of a story that was suppressed a couple years ago.
Yep.
You were not allowed to even go into a National Basketball Association game with free Hong Kong t-shirts.
So it's a hyper.
I mean, you think about it, these associations, Hollywood especially, Hollywood banking and sports are the three major industries that are controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
Hollywood banking.
There's more than that.
Tech, too, but not even as much as Hollywood banking and sports.
The fact that we're being apologetic to them, like, hey, we're so sorry.
what can we do to make you happy and you can easily you America helped China become who they are today with the relationships over the years.
Yeah, I mean, I don't mean to interject, but without us giving them favored nation status, without the 1999 World Trade Organization Treaty, they are a third world country, period.
And we basically said, okay, we're going to re-domicile our manufacturing assets.
We're going to close down our ability to make stuff.
And we're going to do this massive labor arbitrage where we're going to send all the jobs to you and we get a bunch of plastic we do not need in return.
And the robber barons that made those deals, and I don't say that lightly because I'm a capitalist, but it was bad for the West, designed this entire thing.
But when you have a relaxed monetary currency, which we do, it necessitates neoliberalism.
Who were the architects of the deal in 1999?
Well, Bill Clinton signed it, but it was largely driven by consultants.
McKinsey Company was the largest company that was basically pushing the kind of idea that we're going to go to a company and say, we'll be able to solve, you see right there, McKinsey and Company, right there.
What was that, 2019?
Yeah.
And we're going to go in.
We'll save you pennies on a dollar.
You could make this trinket in China for this.
Even this tie right here is made in China.
I was like wearing it earlier.
Are you kidding me?
Why can't we make this here?
It's because we want to try to get the lowest cost.
And for certain products, it made sense.
But why do we make penicillin and vitamin C?
90% of all our vitamin C comes from China.
Like, that makes no sense.
And so we offshored our critical infrastructure to a country that seemed to be kind of a passive country, and it's now turned into our greatest enemy.
And what have we gained from that?
Just lower prices on the bottom.
When you go to Walmart?
I'll tell you what we've gained.
Our homes are twice as big as they were in the 1950s with twice as much garbage that we do not use.
And they're half filled.
They're twice as empty because we have less kids.
So we have piles of plastic we do not use and factories that are empty.
And then in return, we fill our entire communities with fentanyl made by the Chinese Communist Party, pumped through by the Sinola drug cartel, and we lose 107,000 people a year to drug overdoses.
And we'll take another step closer to home.
And I'm teaching people new words today, Pat.
Myquiladora.
Mykilodora means little sister.
Myquiladora was the concept of putting a small factory in Mexico where the labor was cheaper and products could be made, and then they would take a very short walk to the United States.
So if that WTO deal doesn't happen in favor of China, it would have turned Mexico into the larger manufacturing power.
And what would have happened to the Mexican economy?
You would have had the eruption, the good eruption of the middle class in Mexico.
And you can trace it right back to the issues that we have with Mexico, to the gang style violence that there are in terms of controlling government areas in Mexico.
Whereas if this happened, you would have turned them into 1950s United States manufacturing power.
And what would have that done to our relationship with Mexico to this year?
It would have made our continent a superpower continent, is what it would have done.
Why did not have the foresight to do something like that?
Because you could make it for cheaper.
They were chasing the labor costs.
Absolutely correct.
And I hate to be that blunt, but the Chinese Communist Party basically said pennies per wage hour for us to be able to make a shoe.
And they were chasing the wage hour.
And look, I'm a capitalist.
I'm a free market guy.
But also, I want markets to point towards something virtuous and good.
And not every deal you do is going to always be in that proper context.
The Chinese Communist Party deal is a bad deal.
And the people that defend it, it's indefensible.
I mean, what we have as a casualty is we have become more and like an owned and operated colony of the CCP.
It's breakable.
It's breakable for many reasons because we still have a free society and they don't.
The fact we have somewhat of a free society is our great competitive advantage.
That right there is how we beat them.
If you unshackle the American entrepreneur, we run circles around these people because you cannot possibly quantify or measure 20 or 30 million free people taking risks.
That will beat a CCP oligarch every day.
That's a planned economy.
Now they have a mixed economy, but they still are not figuring out entrepreneurship there because they have to control.
They have to confiscate wealth.
It's still fear-based.
It's still fear.
A true free society economically could destroy these guys in a decade.
And what you don't realize is you're seeing a reflection of the 1950s and 60s Soviet Union, where they tried to put in place these five-year economic plans centered around crop plans and agriculture.
And we're going to export to Europe, and that's where we're going to get our power out of it.
And they had a couple things.
They had uranium.
They had limited LNC because of the extraction that they were going at that time.
Blah, Well, guess what?
That is exactly what you're seeing happen here: these limited economic plans that are based on control of the populace, the labor force, are not working for China just the same way they didn't work for the Soviet Union.
Can I ask you a question, Peter?
Pat?
Because I know this is something that's near and dear in your heart.
Obviously, you know, entrepreneurship, capitalism is the backbone of what value attainment is all about.
You've interviewed whether it's General Robert Spalding, countless people that what's the one gentleman that you've had multiple times?
He's an expert in China relations.
Gordon Chen.
Gordon Chen, correct.
He's excellent.
So when you say that China is fear-based, and Charlie corrected out, you have 20, 30 million entrepreneurs here in America that can spur American exceptionalism again.
That's a great economic comment.
When you say fear-based with China versus… I'll give you a perfect idea.
So if I go to TSA Pre to get my TSA Pre card, you're in fear because you're dealing with a government organization.
Customer service is non-existent.
The lady's talking to me as if I work for her.
I told you to be here 15 minutes ago.
I'm like, you got to be kidding me.
I'm driving up.
Are you serious?
Yes, I told you.
I'm like, wow.
Then go to Clear.
You go to Clear.
You know how they'll talk to you?
Oh my God, thank you so much for coming.
And thank you for this and thank you for that, Rob.
If we can grab a bottle of water.
So Clear will give you customer service because they want your business.
TSA Pre knows you don't have a choice.
You best respect us, right?
Fear, free.
TSA fear, clear, free.
America is free.
Still, China is fear.
You're afraid walking around.
You got to make that guy happy, this guy happy, that guy happy, this guy happy.
It's all about that.
This is why some, by the way, earlier question I asked of you guys, and I asked Charlie, Kelly, you can just bring it up.
Earlier question, I asked of Charlie, I said, what would happen to America today if Elon doesn't buy Twitter, if Spotify doesn't drop, if Spotify drops Rogan, let's say, and a Rumble isn't there, what would happen?
Entrepreneurs are going to fix 95% of the world's problems.
Because in climates like this, you don't think YouTube in their board meetings, they're talking about Rumble right now?
What do you think they're talking about?
You don't think Facebook and YouTube and all those guys are sitting there pissed off at Elon for allowing freedom of speech?
You don't think YouTube and all the Silicon Valley people are not pissed off at Sweden, Daniel, for not dropping Rogan.
How dare you not drop Rogan?
How dare you not drop Rogan?
Capitalists expose bad arguments, and that's what's happening right now.
I want to transition into a couple other things as a parent of seven months.
Yes.
Seven months, which is exciting.
Life-changing.
Your eyes, man, tell a story right now.
I remember having our first.
As parents, you know, you think about these things now, where before when you were single, you're like, maybe it's not as big of a deal.
Biden says transgender people shape our nation's soul.
I've never heard this before.
In official proclamation, okay, President Biden's issued an official proclamation declaring March 31st as the Transgender Day of Visibility, stating that transgender Americans shape our nation's soul and contribute to society in various fields, including the military, medicine, politics, and business.
He also expressed concern over discriminatory state laws targeting transgender youth and the epidemic of violence against transgender women and girls, particularly women and girls of color.
Anyways, he keeps going on and on, and you see what Jean-Pierre, Corinne Jean-Pierre was talking about.
And then I saw a clip.
I want to play this clip for you if you can.
Rob, if you can play that clip off of Twitter, and I want to get your reaction.
This kid is 11 years old.
I'm sure you've seen this.
He gets up there speaking to the board, then his father speaks afterwards.
Can you play this clip real quick, Rob?
Hi, my name is Noxy Jack.
I'm 11 years old, and I go to middle school.
I'm a sixth grader.
I was in the library, and this book was on a stand.
I'd like to read you a page.
My back over my hips as I ask if we should take our clothes off.
And he's saying yes before I finish my sentence.
He's pulling off my t-shirt, laughing when I can't undo his shirt buttons.
He's undoing my belt.
I'm reaching into his bedside drawer for a condo.
I think you got another video playing in the background, Rob.
Yeah, you got some kind of another clip playing in the background.
Yeah, you got one other clip because that music doesn't match it.
It's kind of strange.
Yeah, very strange.
Yeah, exactly.
In exactly the same way you're thinking about it.
I'm thinking about it.
That doesn't fit.
No, okay, go back to it and play it.
AI could replace.
No, you still got another clip playing, Rob.
I'm happy to comment on it.
Yeah, go ahead.
Comment on him until he finds the video.
Yeah, look, this is happening in school districts across the country.
Basically, the kid goes on to read an incredibly graphic and pornographic piece of literature that is presented prominently in a middle school library.
He said it was like the first book when he walked in, which is insane.
It's outright grooming.
It's happening.
It comes up afterwards.
And his father was very upset.
I do not mean to make this political because it should not be political.
But I will make it political because Ron DeSantis, to his great credit, said that has no place in schools.
And they called him a book banner.
The Democrat Party says that's okay.
And that needs to really set into people.
Again, I hope it's not political.
I don't think most Democrats even support that crap.
But as a political issue, they went after Ron DeSantis for trying to say this has no place in our schools.
And you read this, you listen to this graphic telling.
And by the way, that's one of thousands of examples that we have found.
There is a targeted campaign that is reflected in some pieces of legislation now in California to say that it's okay to rob a child of their innocence.
It's not a big deal.
In fact, it's a good thing.
See, the problem, Rob, do you have it now?
Or if you can play it, I want to see him reading this, the reaction.
Go to, yeah, go to 10 seconds into it.
There you go.
Press play without the.
I was in the library and this book was on a stand.
I'd like to read you a page.
My back over my hips as I ask if we should take our clothes off.
And he's saying yes before I finish my sentence.
He's pulling off my t-shirt, laughing when I can't undo his shirt buttons.
He's undoing my belt.
I'm reaching into his bedside drawer for a condom.
We're kissing.
Again, we're rolling over.
Obviously, you can see where this is going.
I don't know if it's because we're feeling especially emotional or just tired.
Or these past couple of weeks have been too much.
But this reminds me so much of the first time we had sex.
We were both fucking terrified.
And the whole thing was kind of terrible because we didn't know what we were doing.
Look at the mom's mom.
But it was good too.
So good.
Because we were a mess of emotions and we were scared and excited and everything felt new.
So this sort of thing just sort of feels like that.
Nick touches me like he's scared that any minute.
Now, this book was at my middle school and it was on a stand.
When I rented it out to show my dad it, the librarian asked if I wanted more and if I wanted a graphic novel version.
Graphic novel version?
I hardly believe it.
That's a comic book.
Of course.
I'm only shocked.
People are surprised.
This is everywhere.
Okay, good.
I was asking for you.
Yeah, I'll take another three minutes.
So that's my son.
Okay.
11 years old.
And went to his library and found that by the entry door of our library, this is the smut that he is finding.
All right.
I don't care whether it's gay, straight, bisexual, whatever the terms are for all this stuff.
Doesn't need to be at our school.
Doesn't need to be at my 11-year-old's library.
And then as far as genderqueer, I've got a son in the high school as well.
And this is bullshit.
We know it.
All right.
We do not need to be having literature that's showing boys how to suck dick.
All right.
This is very, very frustrated about it.
Okay.
And you may think that schools know the best for our children.
You know who know the best for our children?
The parents.
This is not an isolated example.
There's thousands and thousands.
No, no doubt about it.
This is why gays against groomers are doing what they're doing at the front.
We had them on two weeks ago.
But for me, you know how historically there are some arguments that Republicans lost, where they lost 92% of the black vote when they lost at Barry Goldwater.
You look at how some arguments where, you know, you lost the Hispanic vote because, hey, they're for this.
This is the kind of thing that could dramatically turn parents against the Democratic vote.
Because say somebody that just votes just to vote, and they don't think about all the details that's going on.
But they say, wait a minute, I'm voting for this, and that's what the Democrats support.
I just don't support that.
So they may go independent.
They may go.
I know earlier today you were saying Joe Manchin was on a show where they were asking him saying, hey, is there any chance that you could run?
And he said, hey, you may run as an independent.
There's going to be opportunities to look elsewhere because the Democratic Party argument today is losing a lot of logical arguments for parents.
I completely agree.
I think it's an opportunity for the other side to make the presentation to connect with the parents.
A couple other stories before we wrap up.
I want to talk about this wonderful capitalist.
I don't know if you've ever heard of him.
He's one of the best capitalists out there who is becoming a little bit more proud and proud to talk about it.
His name is Bernie Sanders.
If you've heard this guy before.
Why doesn't he give his book away for free?
Yeah, he's got a net worth somewhere between $5 to $8 million.
He was upset when he was called out on it earlier.
I want you to play the clip first, Rob, of what happened with him and what's his name, Mark Wayne Mullen, when they're going back and forth.
Just play the first.
If you can, I don't know if you have the clip.
It's the Forbes clip.
I sent it to you.
It's on YouTube.
It's not on, it's a YouTube link I sent you.
If you go on YouTube and you type in Bernie Sanders and you type in his name, Mark Wayne Mullen, you'll see it.
And go to the second one, the seven-minute one.
Yeah, obviously we're not going to watch the whole thing, but I want you to start it off.
So first of all, they cut off Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks.
He lets him finish his thought.
He finishes the story, then he comes back.
And go about 20 seconds into it and press play, and then we want to see the last minute.
As you might imagine, go a little bit further until he's going to be able to do that.
I'm curious to understand what happened in Buffalo.
You're anti-union as a CEO, you're anti-union busting, or you're for union busting.
I'm not saying you're anti-union.
I'm just saying that it seems like to me, as a former CEO, not nearly at the success that you were at, sir.
And I'm not trying to defend your company because, quite frankly, politically, we're on totally different ends of the spectrum.
And so the irony of this hearing is actually kind of like I do want to point out some hypocrisy about this hearing with the chairman.
Wow.
And it's not trying to get personal.
All this information is going to be very public.
But the fact that you can't defend your company because you want to have a good relationship with your employees and you believe in employee value, which we all do.
Any CEO knows that the success of our companies are based on our employees.
We get that.
But it seems like unions today, all they want to do is fight with their employees or their employer, the same employer that is hiring those team members.
And that friction causes a very volatile and tough workplace.
And if the company and the employees aren't going to be able to get to the business.
Can you go 10 seconds?
Keep going 10 seconds on the 10th.
Because Bernie is worth $8 million.
Keep going.
And unions and the people who are going to be able to do it.
Test the 10 seconds, testing 10 seconds.
But I take offense to the chairman pointing out that all CEOs are corrupt because they're millionaires.
If you make a lot of money, you're corrupt.
Yet it's bothering to me because, Mr. Chairman, you yourself have been very successful.
Rightfully so.
Glad you have.
And you've been in office for 28 years, and you and your wife have immersed a wealth of over $8 million.
And in fact, your quote on being wealthy and being a millionaire was, well, if you write a bestseller, you can be a millionaire too.
If you can be a millionaire, why can't Mr. Schultz and other CEOs be millionaires and be honest too?
If that's the case, then why is it that Mr. Schultz, who actually creates jobs and a bestseller of a book, isn't creating any jobs?
Why is it that he's corrupt and you're not?
Straight up one, Adam.
Why is it that all CEOs are corrupt because they're wealthy and yet our chairman, who is wealthy, and I'm glad you are, you're not.
So fast forward now when they have their back and forth and he's trying to defend it.
He says, this is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen.
To be sent to the state.
Keep going, keep it.
There you go, right there.
Go ahead.
Thank you.
Well, let me respond.
The senator did mention my name, I think.
And I think you got an all-time record here.
You've made more misstatements in a shorter period of time than I have ever heard.
Please correct me.
Well, if I'm worth $8 million.
Excuse me.
No, public.
Excuse me.
Yeah, go ahead.
All right.
Excuse me.
Yes, sir.
If I'm worth $8 million, that's good news to me.
I'm not aware of it.
That's a lie.
All right.
Number two.
You're probably looking at some phony right-wing internet stuff.
It ain't true.
All right, you should read beyond that.
It is not true.
All right.
Public records.
No, it is not public record.
Okay.
Well, you made $1.7 million on your public record.
You make $2.7 million on your book.
Excuse me.
I've got the mic now.
Number two.
You want to take out.
Okay, you can pause it here.
I'll get some comments, and then I'm going to show a one-minute clip, and then we'll wrap it up.
Go ahead.
When you see something like this with Bernie going after guys like Howard Schultz, who's created 400 2,000 jobs, what do you think about this exchange?
I'm an entrepreneur.
You're an entrepreneur.
Creating value is hard, and it takes risk.
And you need capital and you need labor.
You need a balance between the two.
But you have no value created unless you have an individual with a drive and the ambition to work the extra nights, wake up the early mornings, and assume all of the responsibility.
You see, all Bernie looks at is the advantage, but he does not realize that at any time when he was CEO of Starbucks, while he was the sole owner, he could have been open to lawsuits.
He could have been open to mass client walkouts.
And if it goes bankrupt, who's the one that then has to go to bankruptcy court?
Are the employees that go into bankruptcy court?
They go find another job.
No, but when you're an entrepreneur, you're not saying, okay, I want the upside, but I want the downside.
And guess what?
Most businesses in America go to the downside direction.
They do not succeed.
That doesn't mean they go bankrupt, but they shut or they fold or they get bought or they just kind of taper out.
And so it's very easy to criticize Howard Schultz.
And I have a lot of problems with Starbucks as a company politically, but that is an unbelievably hard business to scale.
I can't think of a, I mean, maybe your business, Patrick, might be harder.
But I mean, it's pretty impressive.
But I mean, I got to be honest.
Silent insurance is harder than coffee.
But think about it.
It's labor intensive.
He turned a commodity into something that was special.
So coffee was never something that was considered to be an experience or worth paying up for.
So he upsold something that was so widespread that people would have in their homes.
And you have to hire hundreds of thousands of people.
The turnover is immense.
You got to train them.
You have to have the rent.
And you got to scale it against also, once you create the genre of coffee service, immediately you have a thousand competitors, right?
Dunkin' Donuts changed their model, Krispy Kremes, and he still stayed excellent.
Donald's built cafes.
Yes, that's right.
And he still pummeled them.
And he still did a good job.
And their coffee's not even that good at Starbucks.
And he kept on doing it.
And I mean, I don't think it's very good compared to most other, but I think it's admirable the way Howard Schultz defended himself because he said, look, I earned that money.
And that's one of my favorite words in the English language is earned.
That's right.
And he tried to cut him off by the way.
That's right.
And Bernie Sanders has not earned anything.
Now, he might have some book deals or whatever, but Bernie Sanders has never, because he's a bum.
He was a bum mayor of Burlington.
He was a bum fail congressman.
And he's a bum senator.
He's never created any value in his life where he's had to say, you know what?
I'm going to take risk.
I'm going to assume responsibility to create voluntary value where someone's going to want to transact with me.
And so Bernie Sanders enjoys being rich.
He does not know what it takes to get there.
But it's really the core element of the socialist worldview, resentment.
I want to show this.
So for the longest time, I love that, by the way, for the longest time, he would always criticize millionaires, millionaires and billionaires, millionaires and billionaires, millionaires and billionaires.
There's this one-minute clip that was done by Think Progress.
They're no longer around.
It was ran by a guy named Judd, I want to say.
And, you know, they were more on the Hillary Clinton side.
So they did not like a socialist getting the momentum that we're getting for American progress.
So he made this video, this one-minute video on Twitter.
If you can go to it with the timeline, it's not this one, Rob, if you can find it.
He made this one-minute video.
It's just go to my Twitter.
Go back to my Twitter account.
And if you should find it, Rob, if you, again, this is one I text you as well.
Right there, right there.
If you can zoom out on that one.
Now watch this.
When you zoom out, okay, played from the beginning.
Just watch when he stops saying millionaires.
If I'm a millionaire.
What millionaires and billionaires?
The billionaires and millionaires.
The millionaires and billionaires.
So good.
See this when he gets the book.
Proliferation of millionaires and billionaires.
Now watch this.
Millionaires and billionaires.
Of millionaires and billionaires.
Stay to the left.
Millionaires and billionaires.
Millionaires and billionaires.
This video is made by Democrats.
Billionaires and billionaires, millionaires and billionaires, millionaires and billionaires.
Boom.
Now he's a millionaire.
2016.
This is a budget of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, and for the billionaire class.
But enough about millionaires and his administration.
Billionaires.
Billionaires and the wealthiest people.
Billionaires and the wealthy.
A handful of billionaires and other billionaires.
Billionaires.
Allow billionaires.
Multi-millionaires and billionaires.
Of multi-millionaires and billionaires.
If you are billionaires, not just enough 1%.
We will be an administration for the working families of this country and not for billionaire campaign contributors.
The day he becomes a billionaire, it'll be called a trillionaires.
I mean, that's his formula right there on what he does.
Charlie, you see something like that.
What do you think about?
I got a lot of work to do because he influences a lot of young people.
And it's very easy to be generous of other people's money.
Value is hard to come by.
A free society allows people to use their reason and their agency and their abilities to create something ex nihilo out of nothing.
And we live in the wealthiest, most prosperous society ever for a reason.
And he's trying to stop that.
His ideas are directly against what has made this society so wealthy and prosperous, and which really is that entrepreneurial underbelly.
What's Charlie's long-term vision to wrap up?
Does Charlie Kirk have any vision of one day being a president?
I don't know.
No.
But I get asked all the time, Charlie, are you going to run for office all this?
I love what I get to do.
I do three hours of radio every day.
We're one of the most successful podcasts out there.
Please subscribe, everybody.
If you can, you can take out your Apple podcast and subscribe.
Put the link below, Rob, so we can make sure they can see you.
That would bless me.
Thank you.
Is it Turning Point USA or is it Charlie Kirk?
And I'll get to that.
Yeah.
So I love what I love to educate.
I love to learn.
I love to read all weekend and then try to distill those ideas in ways that people can understand.
That's where I'm my most passionate.
And then we have Turning Point USA, which is our movement of hundreds of thousands, soon to be millions of people that believe in freedom, fighting for it.
And so I'd rather be a movement leader and a thought leader than just a politician.
That's where I find myself to have the biggest impact and the most joy.
But we don't know, right?
And you got to keep a little bit open.
You don't know what's going to happen.
Well, first of all, I can't.
I'm 29 years old, so I can't legally run for the presidency.
Six more years is that.
I don't want to be president.
I think it would be a crummy job.
I have a lot of work to do, okay?
It'd be a crummy job.
Think about it.
I mean, it depends on the circumstances, but you got nonstop pressure.
You got the deep state coming out all the time.
You like it, though.
You like a fight.
I do love the fight.
It's the job of a fighter.
I'm not going to run for president.
I'm not doing that.
The good thing is, today they came out with somebody did research the other day saying the average person, there's going to be people born today that are going to live up to 140 years.
So essentially, we have 111 more years to go.
Like in the days of Noah, literally.
In the scriptures, they say you're going to be living in the days of Noah.
Now I know we're living in the days of Noah.
The sons were 100 when they went on.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
I'll say one thing to you.
I've seen a ton of your clips online.
I completely appreciate how you walk into enemy territory and hold people accountable.
And a lot of times their arguments are just emotional.
And you have logic and facts on your side, so that's respect.
What campuses can we see you on coming up?
I think you're a very necessary voice, especially where we see the direction that Gen Z is going.
What's that looking like in the future?
Yeah, so we just finished our campus tour.
I did my mostly peaceful campus visit at University of California Davis, where they sent Antifa and they came with weapons and made big news.
Elon Musk commented on it.
It was all over the place.
But we just finished our campus tour.
We have some big events coming up.
They can go to tpusa.com.
Start a high school or a college chapter with Turning Point USA.
That is our movement.
It's the crux of everything I do and we do.
The field program is the largest ever pro-freedom field program in the history of the country.
And we have people that disagree with us.
In fact, if you look at our campus events, I'm really proud of this.
Anytime I speak anywhere, I have anyone who disagrees go to the front of the line.
And in fact, I tell the crowd not to boo them or heckle them.
I love the fight.
I love dialogue.
In fact, I think that's what makes us human.
Dialogue literally means through reason, through the logos.
I think when we stop talking, we go into a totalitarian dystopia.
And I think we have to have more difficult conversations, lean into the topics that are considered to be politically incorrect or third rail.
And it makes life fun and interesting and worth living.
Charlie, it's been great having you on.
Like Adam said, we agree.
You're a very, very necessary voice.
Thank you.
And you're going to be a force to be reckoned with for decades to come, whether it's in office or doing what you're doing or something new.
Who knows what's going to happen, but we're looking forward to it either way.
Thank you.
Appreciate you for coming on.
Gang, if you're watching this, make sure to go click on a link below, subscribe to his podcast, follow him with all the links that we have below.
