Pete Hegseth has been appointed as the new Secretary of Defense, and I'm here to talk about why I think he's going to be a great defense secretary. He's not a neocon, not a war hawk, and he's a creative thinker. The world is losing their mind, the media is, and the swamp is losing its mind. I think a historical comparison is apt. When George Marshall became Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, in September 1939, the same day that the Nazis invaded Poland, he was set to fire lots of flag officers and even a lot of colonels. Many, many of them were prepared to fight the last war. And we have now, with the same amount of Flag officers in the United States Armed Forces as we did in World War II, when we had 14 million people in the armed forces. Now, we have less than 1.3 million, so 10% of those are serving in the Armed Forces. And yet, they've managed to be defeated consistently in one of the world's worst ways: in the face of a choke point, being defeated by the Houthis. So yes, yes, he's the man for the job. And I'm very excited about it. And also, get involved with Turning Point USA at TTPusa at TurnPoint USA at Turnpoint USA atTPusa.org, and also get your questions answered by Eric Prince, the co-founder of Unplugged Technologies at UNPLUGUED Technologies at Unplundered Technologies at TWUVA at TWUPUSA at TWTPUSA. Thanks for supporting the show, and thank you for supporting The Charlie Kirk Show at CharlieKirkShow! - Charlie, you deserve it. - Eric, you are a great guy and I know you do too. - Thank you, Charlie, and you're a great friend of the show. - Teddy, too! - Teddy and Eric, too, Teddy, and Teddy, thank you so much for being a good friend of The Charlie Kirker Show, and thanks for listening and supporting us, and supporting this show, you're awesome, and we're going to keep coming back for more of this, right here, right? Thank you for listening, Charlie and Teddy and Teddy. Teddy & Teddy, Teddy, Teddy & Eric, and Ted, and all the rest of the crew at the Charlie Kirk Podcast, and so much more!
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00:02:30.000Eric, last evening, an American hero and terrific friend of mine, Pete Hegseth, who served his country and then became a TV host, was announced as Secretary of Defense.
00:02:57.000It is definitely a change of pace of the normal swamp dwellers that have led us to ruin over the last 25 years.
00:03:06.000I think a historical comparison is apt.
00:03:10.000When George Marshall became Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, In September 1, 1939, the same day that the Nazis invaded Poland, he's set to firing lots of flag officers and even a lot of colonels.
00:03:29.000Because they were all prepared to fight the last war.
00:03:32.000And we have now, we have the same amount of flag officers in the United States Armed Forces as we did in World War II when we had 14 million people in the Armed Forces.
00:03:45.000Now we only have less than about 1.3 million, so 10%.
00:03:49.000So there is an enormous amount of culling and cutting and reforming that Pete Hegseth needs to do.
00:03:57.000And I and my entire network of friends are ready to help him in any way possible because the Republic needs to be defended.
00:04:07.000And we're spending the Pentagon consumes a trillion dollars a year.
00:04:11.000Of our national wealth, and yet they cannot protect even one inch of the U.S. border with Mexico, and they've managed to be defeated consistently in the Babel Mandab off of Yemen, one of the world's major shipping ways, a choke point, being defeated by the Houthis.
00:05:44.000A sad comparison is to look at the bloat of the Pentagon and how overpriced the weapon systems are.
00:05:52.000It's about the same as Mark Milley's level of fitness.
00:05:56.000Look, there needs to be a reinstallation of discipline across the ranks.
00:06:03.000Hard young people will join the military if they see hard leaders leading them saying, follow me into battle, instead of go there and sit in a half-assed deployment for months at a time.
00:06:19.000Without being allowed to finish the job.
00:06:21.000This idea of managed conflicts and half measures and the forward deployment of thousands of lawyers really becoming what Zompolits were in the Soviet Union What Eric is highlighting as we try to reestablish connection is, wait, so you would rather have Mark Milley?
00:07:04.000You know, the Pentagon is a massive bureaucracy.
00:07:07.000I served four terms on the Armed Services Committee, and I can tell you that even the most experienced general, admiral, CEO that went into the Pentagon got spun around in circles.
00:07:20.000It's a lot easier to say what you're going to do on a podcast than it is when you're actually over at the Pentagon.
00:07:30.000The people that think that generals and admirals that have given their entire life to this country are going to just roll over is a serious misreading of the Pentagon.
00:08:28.000You have a huge disconnect between a lot of combat vets, which have seen real combat and lost friends and eaten a lot of foreign dirt in the pleasure of serving the country, while bureaucrats, senior officers may have wanted to serve in combat, but didn't, and for whatever reason.
00:08:46.000You know, for a while in Iraq, we actually had 93 flag officers on the ground, 93 general officers, all of them there.
00:08:54.000I would say Polluting the place because they had so many staff and so much bureaucracy with them, it prevented any kind of decisive decision-making, trillions of dollars, thousands of dead Americans, and we also know how Afghanistan ended.
00:09:12.000So it's a disaster, and Pete Hegseth, I believe, is the man for the job, and a lot of people will help him get his job done.
00:09:56.000And this pick comes, and we should note, it comes just hours after an important reporting from the Wall Street Journal that says the Trump transition team is considering a draft executive order to establish a warrior board, their words, of retired senior military personnel with the power to review three- and four-star officers and recommend that they be deemed unfit for leadership.
00:10:16.000Mostly over their support for DEI and woke policies.
00:10:19.000Per this reporting, this would allow Trump, who can fire anyone he wants as commander-in-chief, but this allows him, this advisory board, to give him cover to do so and potentially remake senior levels of the Pentagon.
00:10:30.000And Jackie, Pete Hanks' appointment would be a part of that if he does indeed lead the DOD. Yeah, good.
00:10:38.000You guys haven't won a war in the last 60 years.
00:10:42.000There is not a single person there that's won a war.
00:10:44.000And let's stop conflating the heroism of the front lines combat vets with guys that have been at the top levels of shuffling bureaucracy.
00:11:06.000That has been a tradition that has been sunsetted.
00:11:12.000Election Day 2024 is in our rearview mirror and conservatives are fired up that President Trump heading back to the White House in January.
00:11:18.000But our fight isn't over and I'm asking you for your help.
00:11:21.000Conservatives for lower health care costs are warning us that Big Pharma and the far left are scrambling to fast track a big government scheme to eliminate free market forces.
00:11:30.000And healthcare before the GOP can take control of the White House and Congress.
00:11:34.000This pharma-backed scheme, called de-linking, would hand a massive $32 billion windfall to the biggest drug companies.
00:11:43.000Hardworking American customers, consumers, seniors, and taxpayers.
00:11:47.000You can help stop Big Pharma's money grab from American seniors and taxpayers by going to pharmawindfall.com right now.
00:11:54.000Congress must reject Big Pharma's scheme to boost drug companies' profits, keep drug prices high, undermine competition in healthcare, and hike healthcare costs for American people.
00:12:04.000Please go now to pharmawindfall.com to join this urgent fight.
00:12:08.000Portions of Charlie Kirkshire are brought to you in part by conservatives for lower healthcare costs.
00:12:50.000The coolest thing I did on board was to be able to participate in a LGBTQ spoken word night and I was able to read a poem that I wrote to the whole ship and that was probably the culmination of the whole deployment.
00:13:06.000The culmination of this individual's entire deployment was being able to read an LGBT poem on a battleship.
00:13:19.000That guy's got to get kicked out of the military immediately.
00:15:14.000And it is important that we train and we understand.
00:15:18.000And I want to understand white rage and I'm white and I want to understand it.
00:15:23.000So what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America?
00:16:26.000A really good way to do that is to use inclusive language.
00:16:29.000Instead of saying something like, hey guys, you can say, hey everyone.
00:16:34.000Another way that we could show that we're allies and that we accept everybody is to maybe include our pronouns in our emails or, like we just did, introduce ourselves using our pronouns.
00:16:46.000Look, we've turned our military into an after-school babysitting program.
00:16:50.000If you're trans, you get out of the military.
00:16:51.000You go figure out your problems somewhere else, okay?
00:16:53.000No place for you in the military if you're trans.
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00:18:30.000Well, first, let me say to you, Charlie and Andrew and the rest of the Turning Point team, Congratulations for what you guys did on Election Day.
00:18:39.000You guys were a grassroots army, a turnout machine, and President Trump, you guys helped put President Trump over the top.
00:18:49.000And I would say this, I made some pretty intentionally inflammatory remarks.
00:18:55.000About Tish James after she held her jaw-dropping press conference after President Trump won in a landslide on November 5th, thanks to you guys in big part, where she came out and said essentially, election be damned.
00:19:09.000I don't care if Trump won in a landslide.
00:20:02.000I hope that this Democrat Manhattan Judge Juan Mershon, who is a Democrat donor donated to Biden, whose daughter, adult daughter Laura Mershon, is raising money off of this case, whose adult daughter is a campaign consultant for Kamala Harris,
00:20:19.000I hope he drops this case next week on the 19th, because if he thinks He's going to send President Trump to Rikers Island on November 26th when the American people put Trump back in the White House.
00:20:34.000That's not going to end well for our country.
00:20:37.000And so I hope that Judge Juan Marchand, this corrupt judge, comes back from the brink.
00:20:44.000He has to declare a mistrial because the Supreme Court held in June that not only is the President of the United States immune from criminal prosecution for his official acts, not his personal misconduct, his official acts, courts also can't take evidence.
00:21:04.000We're just going to break away just for a second here and hear from Senator Thune, Mike.
00:21:08.000So let's go to Senator Thune, please, the new Senate Majority Leader.
00:21:11.000...the mess left by the Biden-Harris-Schumer agenda, but also to deliver on President Trump's priorities.
00:21:20.000We will make sure that the President and his team have the tools and support that they need to enforce border security laws and to remove the violent criminals who are wreaking havoc in every one of our states.
00:21:32.000We will work to make America prosperous again by streamlining the bureaucratic machine and overturning costly Biden-Harris regulations.
00:21:41.000And we will work to restore American energy dominance.
00:21:46.000Not just our energy security, but energy dominance, which will lower costs and bolster our national security.
00:21:55.000I'm excited to get to work with this team right away, and I want to thank my colleagues who placed their faith in me to serve as leader, and to those who were supporting another candidate, I promise to be a leader who serves the entire Republican conference.
00:22:11.000We'll have an ambitious agenda, and we'll take each and every Republican working together to be successful.
00:22:19.000With that, I want to turn things over to Senator John Barrasso, the newly elected Republican Whip.
00:22:44.000Only one in four Americans thought that the country was heading in the right direction.
00:22:50.000And you've seen the Republican Party grow in terms of hard-working middle-class families, in terms of minorities, in terms of young people, in terms of families struggling to get by.
00:23:00.000In the last three weeks before the election, I was all over the country with President Trump, with J.D. Vance, as well as a number of our Senate candidates.
00:23:08.000One of the stories that stuck with me was a woman in Michigan We talked about the fact that she was embarrassed to let her husband know that she had to go to the local food bank in order to get by.
00:23:20.000Republicans listened to those stories.
00:23:25.000Democrats were focused on President Trump.
00:23:28.000Republicans were focused on the needs of the American people, people who wanted to get prices down, wanted to secure the border, wanted us to unleash American energy, people who wanted to make America look and be strong once again around the world.
00:23:46.000That's what the Republicans listened to, that's what we're responding to, and we are now working together to make sure we can put America back on track.
00:23:57.000The newly elected Republican Conference Chair is the Senator from Arkansas, Senator Tom Cotton.
00:24:24.000Starting on January 3rd, that's what we'll all be working to build again with President Trump, with Mike Johnson, and the rest of the House Republicans on behalf of the American people.
00:24:38.000The newly elected Republican Policy Chair is the Senator from West Virginia, Senator Shelley Moore Capito.
00:24:46.000Thank you, and congratulations to our new leader, John Thune.
00:24:50.000He will be a strong voice as he has been in the past as the whip, and I look forward to serving with him and with all of our leadership team.
00:25:00.000We had a really strong, healthy discussion, and we've all come out united and friends.
00:25:07.000That was in our discussion is one of the people that is going to, although he didn't say anything, his presence was very much felt, and that is the Vice President-Elect J.D. Vance.
00:25:16.000I think the fact that he not only was a voting member of our conference, but also in there with us every step of the way to make sure that the direction that we're going to go as a united conference And with me leading the policy issues, and all of us working together, that we're going to have a united voice.
00:25:36.000And I'll say one thing about the election, I've said this on all my local stations, what I think the biggest issue was, and there are big ones, border and national security and others, it is literally the American family, the mom and the dad, the grandmother, whoever it is, going to the grocery store.
00:25:57.000And we could see, all of us could see, the escalating costs of something so very basic to us, just the cost of food, and hearing from the Vice President in her campaign, the economy's doing great, don't worry.
00:26:12.000And so we hear those voices, we hear them loud and clear, and those are the voices that we're going to respond to, along with President Trump, through the next several years.
00:26:24.000The newly elected Senate Republican Conference Vice Chair is the Senator from Oklahoma, Senator James Langford.
00:26:40.000Over 70% of the country right now believes the country is on the wrong track.
00:26:46.000Our task is going to be very, very simple.
00:26:47.000To defend our values, to be able to strengthen us as a nation, and to be able to bring prosperity to people that are really struggling right now.
00:26:55.000That's a primary issue for us, and all of those things are things that we're going to get onto immediately because the American people have spoken and said, we do not like the direction that the country is going, so let's get us back on a better direction.
00:27:07.000So this leadership team, President Trump, J.D. Vance, we're headed in a direction to be able to get the country back on the track that she is looking for.
00:27:18.000And the newly elected chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair is the Senator from South Carolina, and he is already planning on expanding our majority in 2026.
00:27:36.000Without any question, President Trump set out to make sure that Americans felt like this country and the American Dream was alive and well and there for them.
00:27:46.000From the border, to fixing the economy, to solving the issue of crime, and restoring confidence on the global stage, President Trump has been very clear on his agenda.
00:27:58.000Our goal with our leader, John Thune, is to make sure that we achieve those objectives.
00:28:04.000My passion is making sure that we defend our current seats and expand the map and expand our majority so that President Trump does not have two years with a Republican majority in the Senate.
00:28:18.000He has four years in control of making sure that America's agenda comes home to each and every household.
00:28:31.000Do you have any concerns about President Trump's cabinet fix so far, and what advice will you give him when it comes to choosing nominees who will pass a set of confirmation?
00:28:41.000Well, as you know, the Senate has an advise and consent role under the Constitution, so we will do everything we can to process his noms quickly, get them installed in their position so they can begin to implement his agenda.
00:29:03.000Well, what we're going to do is make sure that we are processing his nominees in a way that gets them into those positions so they can implement as agenda.
00:30:19.000But I think you'll agree this reason trumps them all.
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00:30:56.000balanceofnature.com promo code CHARLIE. Mike Davis continues from the Article 3 project.
00:31:27.000I think that sometimes The staffs in the Senate are very risk-averse, particularly leadership staff.
00:31:34.000So I think Thune just needs to make his leadership staff take trips with him back to South Dakota so they can get in touch with real Americans in real America and they don't get swamp brain from being in D.C. too long.
00:31:49.000And I think Thune, you know, there was a lot of rumblings about Thune versus Rick Scott.
00:31:54.000And Cornyn, you know, the Senate has decided, I presume the Senate would go with them just because they're a very conservative body and just in the manner in which they operate.
00:32:05.000And I think he's going to pleasantly surprise us.
00:32:11.000I have no evidence to support that, so I'll trust you, Mike, because that sounded just like a typical politician press conference, but I will take your word for it.
00:33:00.000If Trump picks a bold Attorney General to team up with Bill McGinley, they need to go in.
00:33:04.000They need to clean out the Justice Department.
00:33:07.000They need to clean out the leadership of the litigating divisions at Maine Justice.
00:33:11.000They need to clean out The leadership of the FBI, including all the key field offices, they need to clean out the key U.S. Attorney's offices like the D.C. U.S. Attorney's Office, the Eastern District of Virginia, the Southern District of New York.
00:33:25.000These people who have been focusing on lawfare and election interference need to be investigated.
00:33:31.000And if appropriate, prosecute it for conspiracy against rights under 18 U.S.C. Section 241.
00:33:39.000There needs to be Inspector General investigations.
00:33:41.000There needs to be Office of Professional Responsibility investigations.
00:33:46.000There needs to be Criminal Division investigations along with investigations in Congress.
00:33:51.000House Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan.
00:33:53.000Senate Judiciary Committee, incoming Chairman Chuck Grassley, my former boss.
00:33:57.000House and Senate Appropriations Committees, House and Senate Oversight Committees.
00:34:01.000This is the most important appointment, the AG, and the most important job is serious Reforms to the Justice Department.
00:34:10.000So we never have a politicized and weaponized justice system again.
00:34:15.000And this goes all the way back to Crossfire Hurricane in 2016.