Steve Krakauer is the architect of the populist nationalist movement in American politics. He is also the founder of Turning Point USA, a youth organization dedicated to fighting for freedom on college campuses across the U.S. He has been described as the face of the movement and the leader of its youth wing, and he has been one of the most influential people in the movement. In this episode, Steve talks about the current state of the country, and how the movement has been impacted by the election of President Trump.
00:00:00.000Hey everybody enjoy this episode become a member members.charliekirk.com that is members.charliekirk.com email us as always freedom at charliekirk.com and become a member to support this program buckle up everybody here we go Charlie what you've done is incredible here maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk Charlie Kirk's running the White House folks I want to thank Charlie.
00:00:26.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:00:47.000Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of The Charlie Kirk Show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals.
00:00:56.000Learn how you can protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investments at noblegoldinvestments.com.
00:02:19.000He makes a decision, the most courageous decision in the history of American politics because he knew what was going to be in front of him.
00:03:57.000If you guys had faltered, if you guys had quit, if you guys had just said, I don't know if we can do this, it was your agency and a collective, the sovereign will of the people.
00:04:18.000I'm only interrupting just because, as I said on your program this morning, I'm busy running an event.
00:04:24.000Educate me as if I'm just passively watching the news.
00:04:26.000What is going on here with the CR up until the moment of this broadcast right now?
00:04:31.000Think about this thing, you know, with Johnson.
00:04:35.000You know, having turfed out McCarthy because of the spending, he, you know, and he's hanging with Vivek, he's hanging with Elon Musk, he's hanging with the president.
00:04:46.000Every time I look, whether it's a UFC fight or the box at the Army-Navy game, or every time he's hanging around, right?
00:04:52.000And he, out of nowhere, there's supposed to be a CR. It's supposed to be two lines.
00:04:57.000Because remember, always remember, the CR itself is just continual spending from the old budget.
00:05:05.000But in practice, it might be necessary.
00:05:07.000The only reason this is necessary, we hate them all, the only reason this is necessary is because this kicks it into President Trump's administration.
00:05:15.000This is where he's got Russ vote at OMB. This is where he has the House, the Senate, the executive branch, his team's back, Scott Besson, Russ vote, Peter Navarro.
00:05:22.000He gives President Trump a chance to craft the current fiscal year we're in.
00:06:37.000We just won by bringing African Americans, Hispanics, white working class in this coalition that's like 1932. And these people, the lived experience, they're not buying the happy talk of mainstream media that the economy is doing great because it's doing great for the top 1% for the oligarchs because of federal spending.
00:06:56.000And here you give a pay raise from $173,000 to $24,000.
00:07:09.000And by the way, we know the guy got shot in the back and there's seething anger among people about this insurance, but we want to opt out of Obamacare, although we voted it for you guys, right?
00:07:18.000If they had put that up front, If they put it up front and not hit it on page 900 of the bill, it'd be different.
00:07:25.000You'd say no, but at least you wouldn't try to hide things.
00:07:29.000This shows you—it's not just Johnson.
00:07:31.000Clearly, he must be removed, but it's not him.
00:07:43.000You weren't supplicants when you canvassed these neighborhoods.
00:07:47.000You weren't supplicants when Pressler went out and changed the architecture of the voting population of Pennsylvania.
00:07:53.000You weren't supplicants when you had Trump's back in Georgia, in New York City, in Florida, when you were standing outside protesting when he was hauled before these fake judges.
00:08:05.000We haven't been supplicants in four years.
00:09:15.000If you look at any revolutionary movement, if you look at the revolution, our American Revolution, you have cadres, small groups of people that form together.
00:09:40.000Please remember your place in history when the history of this age is written.
00:09:46.000They will not remember Elon Musk, they will not remember Tucker Carlson, they're not going to remember Charlie Kirk or Steve Bannon.
00:09:51.000It's going to be the age of Trump and they're going to remember the MAGA movement, okay?
00:09:56.000They're going to say a movement came up from the 2008 financial crisis.
00:10:00.000It took decades to build, but eventually it took over the politics of the country, of the American Republic and saved the American Republic.
00:11:23.000If you look at the podcast, if you look at the Twitter, these different social media platforms, all the information, the force multiplier, the hardest job I have every day and the producers of my show is to keep ahead of you.
00:11:37.000To make sure that, hey, they've heard this, they know this, right?
00:12:43.000I mean, you were so—in the 2021-2022 cycle, we were just getting started on RAV. We were still getting to know each other, and we've gotten to know each other really well the last couple years.
00:12:52.000But you were so early on, we're all in for Trump, and we were too, but you were forcefully early that this thing is going to be a decisive 2024 victory.
00:13:02.000It was—the clairvoyance was remarkable.
00:13:04.000I mean, your skeptics would say it's just luck.
00:13:07.000You know, Steve just kind of rolled snake eyes, but it's not.
00:13:10.000Like, you saw—what did you see— I saw 16. When they were 14 points down, they called me on August 13th because I was running Breitbart.
00:13:19.000And I had a conversation with President Trump.
00:13:20.000He's like 12 or 14 points down with the Muslim family, with the Constitution.
00:14:13.000You just see the lived experience of how people live.
00:14:15.000You just see that you can understand the math of the economics.
00:14:18.000The American people, we've hollowed out The greatest country in the world.
00:14:22.000We are a manufacturing superpower with high-value-added jobs that an individual, like my dad, could be a foreman for the phone company and have a stay-at-home mom that raised the kids and have five kids that all went to Catholic school and then all went to college, right?
00:14:46.000Well, it's not the physical property of the universe.
00:14:49.000It's because people make conscious decisions to ship the jobs overseas because they made money with having the Lao Beijing, the Chinese slave labor, do the jobs.
00:16:07.000In this arc of this story, in the arc of this story, they had to steal it.
00:16:12.000Because we had to see, and more Americans had to see how radical they are, how they are neo-Marxist, how they would destroy this country.
00:16:19.000Now they're all coming out with the stories about the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in the last 48 hours, and how Biden was never really present.
00:16:27.000They had to cover up in the National Security Council everything we've been saying for the last four years, they now admit is true.
00:17:10.000His imperfection makes it a more powerful story, that he is imbued by divine providence to lead a movement to save this country, and that's it.
00:18:22.000The prisoners in there, the Hispanics and African Americans, hate the Democratic Party, and they hated Kamala Harris, and they hated Joe Biden.
00:18:30.000And about 60% voted or their families voted for Trump, but the other 40% wouldn't vote.
00:19:40.000Look, I'm not going to tell anything, private conversations, but Steve will reiterate, there is a force of energy to get pardons for J6 prisoners.
00:20:22.000What they did to those people in D.C., and this is why the investigations have to take place, the people that tormented and tortured them in D.C. prison, war crimes.
00:20:30.000They have to be tried, they have to be investigated, and they're going to go to prison.
00:21:21.000Yeah, the most high-profile preemptive pardon, of course, was Gerald Ford pardoning Nixon.
00:21:26.000And what it does is that a prosecution will not have the guster to go through the process of writing indictment and going to trial if there's even a slight chance that the conviction will not be held up in court.
00:21:46.000These are the people that were constantly telling us that we're the criminals and they're even, they are legitimately probing preemptive pardons.
00:23:07.000Look, I had above a top secret clearance when I was 20-some years old, coming back as a naval officer in my destroyer and then coming back to the Pentagon.
00:23:17.000And then I had a high security clearance and saying, 99% of it is to keep the information from you.
00:23:37.000To be governed by the top 100 partners at Goldman Sachs or Cravath or Sullivan and Cromwell, McKinsey or Bruce Allen, and the first 100 people that walked in this room, I take you 100 every day, right?
00:24:19.000And we owe it to this republic, to every patriot's grave, all the way back to the founding of this republic, the New Jerusalem, to hunt it down to the ends of the earth and bring them to justice.
00:24:32.000We have time for a couple more, maybe one or two, and then I've got to get Steve prepped for on stage.
00:24:36.000I don't want to just throw him up on stage.
00:24:38.000That wouldn't be fair for the great Steve Bannon.
00:25:37.000I just want to thank you for what you guys have done for the grassroots movement, what you're doing for just the people of America that we're tired of all of this crap.
00:25:54.000I'm wearing my dad's Trump 2020 hat, and it means a lot to me.
00:26:00.000My dad, I think, was kind of an original troller.
00:26:03.000And so my question, I would say, is my dad said one time that he was going to the pro-Trump rally, meaning that it was January 4th, 2021. And so he was a big believer in the grassroots effort and Trump and the businessmen, and he highly believed in Ross Perot.
00:26:23.000And I just wondered what you guys thought about businessmen and that kind of that movement and running the country.
00:26:30.000I will say that the underappreciated through line of what Ross Perot pinpointed in the early 90s, direct connected to Trump.
00:26:41.000In the sense where he said the same stuff, that sucking noise you hear is Mexico taking our jobs from us.
00:26:46.000He was a populist nationalist that, remember, he was poised to win the presidency, and then all of a sudden he stopped his campaign and suspended it because there was someone following him in his front yard.
00:27:01.000But Ross Perot was very clairvoyant and saw ahead, saw the harbinger, the canary in the coal mine of the de-industrialization of the American body politic.
00:27:11.000How many, did anyone here vote for Ross Perot?
00:27:34.000He was the first, really, on the national stage fire-breathing popular, I guess since Huey Long or William Jennings Bryan or Andrew Jackson.
00:28:03.000I represent an organization called Hindus for America First.
00:28:07.000We mobilized over a million Hindu-American voters to support the Republican Party and America First candidates, including Donald Trump.
00:28:15.000And one of the concerns that we wanted to bring to the president, and he actually tweeted about it, or posted about it on X, at the end of October was the persecution of religious minorities in Bangladesh following the fall of Sheikh Hasina.
00:28:34.000There are Christians, Jews, and Hindus being persecuted by the Clinton Foundation darling, Muhammad Yunus, And I would love to know what you think.
00:28:45.000I know you said Donald Trump is not a churchy man, but what will he do to protect religious freedoms and religious minorities?
00:28:53.000Well, saying he's not churchy, you know, I think he has a very spiritual side to him.
00:28:58.000I mean, Donald Trump's got a big heart.
00:30:19.000In fact, it was the best performance Trump ever had in this state.
00:30:22.000Whereas you can't say that for North Carolina-Georgia.
00:30:24.000He actually underperformed his previous totals from 16. It's three parts to how you get there.
00:30:29.000Number one is the Scott Presser or the mentality to go change the composition of the electorate by doing voter registration, sitting in those parking lots and 105 degrees and doing it.
00:30:42.000The other part is the canvassing and getting out the vote and making sure you have the phone banks, you have all of it, that huge logistics round and volunteers that do it over and over and over again.
00:30:52.000And the last part is training up the election integrity.
00:30:55.000So you're sitting at the table and they can't steal it like they tried to steal it before.